Second Sight (1989)

This review concerns a movie that most of you, no doubt, have never heard of. After you've read this, you will know why you've never heard of it.

The world of television is, as some would attest to, a springboard for its actors to the "more respectable" world of movies. Certainly the likes of John Travolta, Tom Hanks and most of the first year's cast of "Saturday Night Live" would agree to that. And there ARE the lucky ones who find success on the silver screen, yet as history will show there are more failures than successes in this segment of acting hopefuls.

In the late '80s, two of the more successful comedy shows on TV were "Night Court" and "Perfect Strangers". Both delivered solid laughs and each one had men who were considered magnificent farceurs; "Court" had the talented John Larroquette and "Strangers" had the irrepressible Bronson Pinchot. Both men had been in films before they hit their stride on TV but neither had that elusive One Big Break (c) that would make them the worldwide stars they knew they should be; something that was tailor-made just for them.

So then along came Second Sight, a film in which both Larroquette and Pinchot were supposed to prove to the world at large that they were just as funny in your neighborhood theater as they were on your TV at home.

The movie is as follows: the Second Sight Detective Agency consists of smart-aleck ex-cop Wills (Larroquette), professor Preston Pickett (Stuart Pankin) and psychic Bobby McGee (Pinchot) who contacts a link in another dimension to help the agency solve otherwise baffling crimes. They are called on by a nun (Bess Armstrong) to find out who damaged a friend's car in a hit-and-run - this escalates into a papal kidnapping plot, uncovers conflicts in Bobby's abilities and develops a romantic possibility between Wills and the nun.

Joel Zwick, the director, is best known for his work directing sitcoms, having lensed episodes for series like "Happy Days", "Full House", "Family Matters" and even episodes of Pinchot's "Strangers". That's a good and a bad thing; good because he should know what's funny with that kind of experience, and bad because he approaches all of his characters like interchangeable parts of a special extended episode of your favorite sitcom. That's bad; really bad. In his defense, though, Zwick directed the better-received My Big Fat Greek Wedding...but that was long after this.

What's worse is the direction is pretty sloppily edited. In one scene a cutaway that's supposed to take place all in one room clearly happens in TWO different locations altogether (the room is clearly an abandoned warehouse, the cutaway is to a corner of a dilapidated apartment that shows up later in the movie!); another example of this plainly shows a crew member's shadow on a manhole cover where the city street is supposed to be deserted. That's worse than bad -- that's incompetent.

Writers Tom Schulman and Patricia Resnick fashioned this story in huge chunks without any flow or reason. Some of the dialogue is just fashioned to serve as awkward one-liners for Larroquette ("Great - I've got a psychic oboe on this case.") and others are just plot threads that go nowhere, like Dr. Pickett's wife using Bobby to get lotto numbers or Bobby's psychic spasms at inopportune moments. And just to make sure this qualifies as a PG movie, your occasional swear word. Some of this poor plotting I can understand; after all, Schulman is also responsible for 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag and the Eddie Murphy mistake Holy Man...but he also wrote What About Bob? and Welcome To Mooseport. Resnick's contributions are nigh well invisible, seeing as she was a graduate of no less than Robert Altman (3 Women, A Wedding) and even wrote 9 To 5. So maybe this was just an off-exercise for them both (they named a character Bobby McGee and never went for the obvious Janis Joplin gag. Or even Kris Kristofferson, for that matter. Just another mark against them.)?

The worst fates are saved for those in front of the camera. Larroquette's charm and grace on "Night Court" are replaced with loutish abrasiveness here, talking down to everyone he comes across, and not even in the entertaining way Assistant D.A. Dan Fielding would. Remember the foul mood that Bill Murray came across with when he starred in Scrooged that same year? Larroquette must have taken the same acting class or maybe he realized just what this movie was going to end up like.

Pinchot gives it all he's got, I'll give him that, but he just ends up annoying. REALLY annoying. Dancing around like a maniac, channeling his psychic link like a constipated New Jersey-ite and trying to "method-act" his way around what a "real" psychic would act like, he tries for the charm of Balki but ends up as annoying as Steve Urkel on "Family Matters".

The support given by Pankin and Armstrong doesn't exactly help matters. Pankin, best known for HBO's "Not Necessarily The News" and small parts in movies like Fatal Attraction is too busy chasing after Pinchot and being browbeaten by Larroquette to make himself any more than a guy in the background that takes pictures whenever Pinchot overacts, commenting "This is very rare".

And Armstrong, so great in earlier movies like The Four Seasons and Nothing In Common here just plays a nun. A cranky nun. A cranky, uninteresting nun. The looks she gives her fellow cast members appear as if she could throttle everyone right then and there (Sister Mary Anger-Management). And never for a minute does it appear like she and Larroquette share one iota of chemistry, even as melted ice cream is poured over them in one scene as they embrace.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the special effects yet! Not only is Pinchot's Bobby a psychic, but he also has the power to mentally change radio stations, levitate people, make marble busts pop up off their pillars and force airplanes to fly right through traffic tunnels. Many of these effects (besides being manipulated by wires) are accompanied by swirly, flashing blue animation that looks to the viewer like someone drew on the film with a turquoise marker. No one else in the film seems to notice (or comment on) these swirly blue lights, though. Maybe they thought if they acted like they didn't notice it would be funnier. Or something.

Which brings me to one important point. For a comedy, this is pretty laugh-free. None of the sight gags work, the one-liners are worse than the worst stand-up act you've ever seen, not a one of these people look as though they're enjoying this chance to work together (though I can't say as I blame them) and, most importantly, when you bring in great actors like John Schuck and James Tolkan for bit parts and don't give them funny things to do, say or react to, you've got more wrong with your movie than swirly blue lights.

So, Second Sight was a tank job that spent less than two weeks in theaters, never got ONE positive review in its initial release and (last time I checked) catapulted absolutely no one into the upper stratosphere of stardom. In fact, all that Second Sight served to do was take up space in theaters until a good film came along and replaced it.

And "good", my friends, is based on inference - because there is absolutely NOTHING worse than Second Sight.