Owned release: The 2009 Universal box. This is on Disc 14.
Acquired: Amazon. Feb. 2014.
Seen before?: Once before from this disc - July 24, 2017.
The only one of the ...Meet films that couldn't be slotted sideways into the horror genre, and the weakest of the bunch. The team was well and truly running on fumes here, so a change of pace - going back to straight comedy after a run of genre hybrids - had to be appealing, and with the added benefit of being a homage to the old days of comedy. The late films, due to the necessity of avoiding the team's classic routines (as they were providing material for the duo's TV show), were heavy on the slapstick anyway, so why wouldn't they want to lean into that and pay their forebearers their due respect by crafting a slapstick comedy set during the early days of slapstick comedy - a sort of pratfall-laden wish-fulfillment vehicle/tip of the cap?
It's a nice idea, for sure. The execution, on the other hand... not so much. The funniest part of the movie is the very first sequence, with Lou making a sobbing nuisance of himself while watching a silent epic entitled Eliza and the Bloodhounds (which, in another instance of recycled history, is made of footage from 1927's Uncle Tom's Cabin) and Bud getting thrown into two flower pots within five minutes. Past that, it's a slow slide into genial mediocrity, with a few scattered chuckles (A&C running out of a tunnel with a train in hot pursuit; Lou giving the camera a knowing glance as he palms some loaded dice) and a lot of big, ostensibly-exciting hunks of vehicular mayhem that sit on screen and die. Given the focus on loud, dangerous stunts and car chases/plane chases, it could be argued that this is essentially the A&C equivalent of a big-budget FX comedy... but where the ideal of something like that is, say, Ghostbusters, this is closer to something like Evolution or Leonard Part 6, where the scale and extravagance fail to paper over the tired gags and minimum-effort performances.
What pushes it into the realms of the obnoxious is the film's insistence that this is indeed all a big screaming laff riot - the big biplane sequence has two crew members at two different points laughing hysterically at how funny this all is. One even tells the blowhard European director - who is actually a NYC con man, but that's something else - "This is very funny, Mr. Touminoff!" to which the director replies, "This is not supposed to be funny!" and here I am thinking they're both wrong. As an argument for the value of comedy in the face of misery and the desire to make "serious" art, this is hardly Sullivan's Travels, and the shaking by the lapels, demanding that we LAAAAAAAAAUGH, is unwelcome and frankly surprising for a duo whose chemistry generally makes this all feel so fluid. By the time the Keystone Kops show up to do their thing, the warmth of the homage has curdled into two steps off a rip-off, a film using the reputation of its predecessors to palm off some shabby goods - the Mack Sennett cameo is an embarrassment - and that's even before the final chase sequence straight-up steals a joke from Sherlock, Jr. In retrospect, it's funny that this has A&C tackling a con artist who's gone into making movies, because someone's getting conned here and it isn't the people on screen.
Note of interest: The villain's female sidekick is named Leona Van Cleef. As Lee Van Cleef was just beginning his career at this point, part of me wonders whether that's a weird shoutout or just a coincidence.
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