Sinbad wants to get rich quick

HOUSEGUEST (1995)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Sinbad and SNL vet Phil Hartman should strike comic gold in more ways than one. Only "Houseguest" is content with being minimally and evasively funny, not laugh-out-loud funny and not built for comic gold. More like comedy barely skidding on the shaved pieces of slate rock.

Sinbad is Kevin Franklin, a "loser" to some who has borrowed money from the mob and lives for the day he can score some lottery winnings. He also invests in baseball cards that nobody wants and other get-rich-quick-schemes. Since the mob is after him, Kevin pretends to be Derek, a dentist buddy of Gary Young's (Phil Hartman) - Gary is a lawyer in the whitest suburbia you will ever see (even Gary's Edgar-Allan-Poe-loving daughter is about as white as porcelain). Gary has not seen his friend, Derek, in 20-plus-years and looks forward to watching his friend display his gifts for golf, dentistry and tasting elegant wines. Naturally Kevin doesn't possess any of these gifts, nor can he pretend to be vegetarian when the local McDonald's is a few blocks away.

Sinbad is a likable performer with a goofy grin but he has precious few scenes where he can really expand the cliched mistaken identity premise. For one, Sinbad doesn't even closely resemble the dentist he is impersonating, and you wonder why students and faculty from nearby institutions don't just pick one of the books the dentist authored and note the deception. For another, Phil Hartman is not used well here, and the notion that his home life is a wreck and that he can't stand up to his racist boss (Mason Adams) is simply marking time. Kevin is the savior of the family in scenes that are as sappy and falsely emotional as they can get, and he learns to be himself. But the get-rich-quick Kevin we see at the beginning of the movie is a lot more interesting than the sanitized Kevin who feels an obligation to Gary's family. Nothing here you haven't seen before.

"Houseguest" is poorly edited and shaped, with strange mini-dissolves during a golf cart fiasco that goes on way past the tolerable meter and frantically cut chase scenes that serve little to no purpose. The mob characters are played by actors who mug incessantly to the point way past and beyond Italian stereotypes. Kim Griest is the displaced wife of Gary's, so displaced that it looks like many of her scenes were left in the cutting room floor. But there is one of the eeriest and most displaced performances in the movie by Kim Murphy as Gary's daughter, who is searching for her family's love in a manner that belongs to a different movie altogether. Sinbad survives unscathed when the movie is over - the rest might seek comic therapy elsewhere.