Who's Harry Crumb?

Who's Harry Crumb?; comedy, USA, 1989; D: Paul Flaherty, S: John Candy, Shawnee Smith, Jeffrey Jones, Annie Potts, Tim Thomerson, Barry Corbin, Valri Bromfield, James Belushi

Jennifer, the daughter of the rich family Downing is kidnapped in a wealth studio. Her father, millionaire P.J., hires the chief of a detective agency, Eliot, to find her. But he doesn't know that Eliot actually organized the kidnapping in order to get a lot of money, and thus hires the equally as fat as clumsy Harry Crumb to investigate the case. Harry teams up with Jennifer's sister Nikki and slowly starts finding clues and suspects Nikki's stepmother Helen and her lover, the tennis coach Vince. Disguising himself, Harry actually solves the case and Eliot gets arrested, thus enabling Crumb to become president of the company.

Canadian comedian John Candy made a notable career in the US and who knows what he could have made if he hadn't died so early. Or had better offers for films. "Who's Harry Crumb?" is a typical trivial comedy where he is hired to play a clumsy detective with crazy red hair, a sort of Inspector Clouseau rip-off, in order to add some level to it, in which he succeeded, even though the syndrome of tiresome writing and predictable gags was not avoided. Among the flaws are already the first 5 minutes, where the movie doesn't even attempt to make a gag, telling the whole kidnapping sequence and set-up in a serious way. It's a matter of a light, short and watchable comedy that is not anything extraordinary: director Paul Flaherty tries to ignite the humor in the format of Crumb causing himself physical pain due to his incompetence and clumsiness, but they are mostly too thin to really make anyone sate, while it seems the authors openly imitated the characteristics of Clouseau a little bit too much since Harry loves to disguise himself into various people, while there is even a scene where he hears voices of two actors from TV and mistakenly thinks their plans are real, just like in one of the Pink Panther films. The worst part turned out to be the humiliating and mean-spirited role for actor Jeffrey Jones' character, whereas even the ending has its problems since it ends well, but is as a whole rather incorrect, which, together with a few bad ideas, reduce the film's value. Too much of this is stupid or insipid to pull this thin story through. But Candy still has some fine moments: for instance, while talking in the home of his client P.J., a fish from a fish tank bites Crumb's finger, so Crumb quickly throws the fish which lands in the exact same position and scale as the photo of a fish that P.J. is holding; or when Crumb throws a dart and hits bullseye, but then said bullseye falls down from the wall and destroys the replica of P.J.'s ship below. 

Grade:+