October 12, 2001 | Ever hear about the guy who liked to pummel his head with a sledgehammer, because it felt so good when he stopped? Maybe the same fellow would appreciate Corky Romano, a lowbrow comedy of staggering imbecility that, on a few rare occasions, manages to be genuinely amusing. Mind you, I could be mistaken: The good stuff might seem so good only within the context of such mind-fogging cruddiness. But unless my critical faculties were completely numbed by everything else in this regrettable misfire – a distinct possibility, I’ll grant you – there are two or three scenes in which Chris Kattan evidences the supple, slapsticky grace of Charlie Chaplin. Really.
Throughout the rest of the movie, unfortunately, Kattan is more obnoxious than engaging, less rib-tickling than nerve-grating. Cast in the title role as the white-sheep son of a mob-connected family, the Saturday Night Live veteran relies heavily on an extremely limited repertoire of fey prancing, whiny panic, rubber-joined pratfalls and giggly-girlish hysteria. To make a bad situation immeasurably worse, Kattan decided it would be a neat idea for his character to shrilly sing along with ‘80s pop tunes on the retro-flavored soundtrack. The horror, the horror.
Long estranged from his cranky Pops (Peter Falk) and thuggish brothers (Peter Berg, Chris Penn), Corky is willfully oblivious to their illegal activities – he assumes they prosper because of a fabulously successful landscaping business — and blissfully happy in his own work as an apprentice veterinarian. But when the FBI targets Pops for a criminal investigation, the white sheep is abruptly hustled back into the Romano family fold.
Leo Corrigan (Fred Ward), the seemingly faithful family retainer, redefines the term “fool’s errand” by drafting Corky to pose as an FBI agent in order to sabotage the bureau’s case against Pops. The retainer, it should be noted, is a turncoat: Early on, the movie reveals that he’s been slipping incriminating evidence to the feds. So it kinda-sorta makes sense that he might cover his tracks by placing the wrong man in the right place at the right time. But little else about the plot is nearly so logical, and almost everything that follows is painfully predictable.
If you’ve seen two or three other comedies in the past few years – in your entire life, actually – you’ll always be three or four steps ahead of Corky Romano. Our chronically klutzy hero repeatedly impresses his FBI commander (Richard Roundtree) and a beautiful special agent (Vinessa Shaw) because – are you ready for this? are you sitting down? — his every gaffe is miraculously misconstrued as the clever work of a crack crimebuster.
A jealous coworker, Brick Davis (Matthew Glave), isn’t so easily fooled by Corky’s charade. But the malcontent can do nothing to tarnish Corky’s reputation, not even when the faux fed pilfers evidence from an FBI vault. A couple of twists in the final reel are supposed to be surprising. They aren’t.
Rob Pritts’ direction of Corky Romano is, to put it charitably, lax. But, then again, how much control does any filmmaker ever have while trying to steer something so obviously designed as a star vehicle?
Kattan has a few truly inspired moments as Corky scrambles over, under and around a parked car while pursued by his brothers. And there a few more chuckles to be savored while Corky recovers from an inadvertent intake of cocaine. Elsewhere in the movie, however, there’s something ineffably creepy about Kattan’s penchant for swishy goofiness – sorry, there’s no other way to describe it – particularly when we’re supposed to accept Corky’s shy romance with the beautiful female agent. Compared to him, Paul Reubens in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure came off as a testosterone-fueled Adonis, and Jerry Lewis at his most spastic in his worst comedy was a rugged macho stud. Yes, I know: The stereotype scrambling in Corky Romano is intended as a joke. But it would help if the joke were, you know, funny.
A few of the supporting players try very hard, and the effort shows. Berg is especially unfunny as Paulie, the Romano brother whose fiery temper stems from a shameful secret — i.e., he can’t read. (He’s not terribly good at thinking, either.) Peter, the other Romano sibling, is even more bellicose, because he’s in deep denial about his repressed homosexuality. Penn struggles to mine humor from this character quirk, but to little avail.
By contrast, Falk, Ward and Roundtree stroll through the proceedings with their customary professionalism. They do not transcend the material so much as maintain a safe distance from it.
