I have this idea of police stakeouts being tiring, laborious things; endless hours, even days, of waiting and waiting for the slightest thing which may not even be of any necessity. I imagine a figure at the forefront of these investigations of immense patience, perhaps a rough but almost always methodical looking individual with the ability to sit and stare; to sit and watch; to ride the storm of sometimes absolutely nothing at all if it means wading out of the other end with something that'll help in the long run. Alas, 1993's Another Stakeout seems to think otherwise; an often loud, often brash and almost constantly unfunny movie dealing with the above like a Looney Tunes cartoon would the issue of hunting rabbits.
The film is the sequel to a fun buddy comedy from a few years previously; a film entitled "Stakeout", and, if like me, you use minimal effort to read into where the brainstorming started in order to come up with such a title for this second film, you'll probably deduce that a third entry would've read something like: "YET Another Stakeout". Such a title, albeit hypothetical to a film that does not exist, conjures up a sense of the laborious; of the necessary although undesirable, and therein we deduce the gradual arc of the nature of both where these films MAY have gone, and where we're at with this particular entry. At the core of it is this comedic black hole is a threesome consisting of: Rosie O'Donnell; Emile Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss. Veterans of the first Stakeout film will identify two of the said three, Estevez and Dreyfuss, who respectively played police officers Bill Reimers and Chris Lecce. Veterans will also recall how well they combined in the middle of a tale which very gradually built into a menacing reality as Dreyfuss' character underwent a few changes in regards to his attitudes towards women and the true extent of their actual case blew wide open.
These three are called upon to watch over a specific house in an easy-on-the-eye locale in the American city of Seattle; the reason being that it is home to a missing young woman named Luella Delano (Moriarty), whose testimony to an ugly recent incident involving innocents and police officers in Las Vegas caught up in a killing spree is paramount in nailing some crooks. In the meantime, however, the residence houses her parents: Dennis Farina's Brian O'Hara and his wife Pam (Strassman). The set up is simple: if she turns up at her family home, then the police have her and those who instigated the aforementioned Nevada chaos go down. But all of this is largely irrelevant for the duration of the film, as our leads slot into a facade of being the new next door neighbours and begin to engage in a series of wacky encounters built purely on the fact O'Donnell has brought her dog along with her and that Dreyfuss is a little miffed at being framed as his co-workers' husband/son as cover. There is a moment where the pseudo family are invited over for dinner, in what should be a centrepiece of comedy running on binary opposition and falsified stories (from both sides) as the O'Hara's try to cover up their daughter's situation and our leads disguise their policing backgrounds. But it runs aground; it doesn't get going. It begins to rely on that sharp pain one gets in the head when one devours ice cream too quickly.
Depressingly, the film goes on to undo all of the good work from the first. Gone are the lessons Dreyfuss learnt, his relationship with Madeleine Stowe's Maria character, of whom was central to the stakeout in the first, is on the brink of terminating and Dreyfuss comes across as all of a sudden obnoxious and unlikeable. Gone too is any sort of rapport between the leads, with the majority of it just three people in a room shouting at each other. Where things worked in the first film, things collapse two-fold here; the sense that these people are at all qualified police officers worthy of the job they're on is suddenly all-but-lost, while the producer's decision to throw in O'Donnell reeks of a panic whereby going bigger and "better" is suddenly the solution to a problem that never existed.
If ever there was an opportunity for a film of this ilk to drive forward with drama and heightened tension, it would be in a situation whereby the restricted view of an area we're aware the importance of is at the forefront of proceedings. In this scenario, a sense of cinema relies on facial expressions; "the image" and, if anything, a LACK of dialogue so as to not distract from the ensuing drama. One's mind boggles at a certain scene whereby Estevez charts the bathroom habits of his newly acquired targets, talking to himself in the process and using specific buzzwords more broadly linked to these excretal activities. It is quite incredible that a fully grown adult was even responsible for the construction of the sequence. And so, the film is a rank failure; one of those rare instances whereby the psychopath who pops up at the end to kill everyone actually gets our vote of approval to just do away with everyone. 2007 German film "The Lives of Others" was a pinnacle of sorts in its depiction of this clandestine world of observing and reporting; of swimming through the trouble of a delicate scenario; of getting under the skin and into the heads of those directly involved in both the observer and the observed. Here, Another Stakeout is the playground humour-ridden mess taking a premise not too dissimilar to the above and turning it into a recipe for unfunny chaos.
The film is the sequel to a fun buddy comedy from a few years previously; a film entitled "Stakeout", and, if like me, you use minimal effort to read into where the brainstorming started in order to come up with such a title for this second film, you'll probably deduce that a third entry would've read something like: "YET Another Stakeout". Such a title, albeit hypothetical to a film that does not exist, conjures up a sense of the laborious; of the necessary although undesirable, and therein we deduce the gradual arc of the nature of both where these films MAY have gone, and where we're at with this particular entry. At the core of it is this comedic black hole is a threesome consisting of: Rosie O'Donnell; Emile Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss. Veterans of the first Stakeout film will identify two of the said three, Estevez and Dreyfuss, who respectively played police officers Bill Reimers and Chris Lecce. Veterans will also recall how well they combined in the middle of a tale which very gradually built into a menacing reality as Dreyfuss' character underwent a few changes in regards to his attitudes towards women and the true extent of their actual case blew wide open.
These three are called upon to watch over a specific house in an easy-on-the-eye locale in the American city of Seattle; the reason being that it is home to a missing young woman named Luella Delano (Moriarty), whose testimony to an ugly recent incident involving innocents and police officers in Las Vegas caught up in a killing spree is paramount in nailing some crooks. In the meantime, however, the residence houses her parents: Dennis Farina's Brian O'Hara and his wife Pam (Strassman). The set up is simple: if she turns up at her family home, then the police have her and those who instigated the aforementioned Nevada chaos go down. But all of this is largely irrelevant for the duration of the film, as our leads slot into a facade of being the new next door neighbours and begin to engage in a series of wacky encounters built purely on the fact O'Donnell has brought her dog along with her and that Dreyfuss is a little miffed at being framed as his co-workers' husband/son as cover. There is a moment where the pseudo family are invited over for dinner, in what should be a centrepiece of comedy running on binary opposition and falsified stories (from both sides) as the O'Hara's try to cover up their daughter's situation and our leads disguise their policing backgrounds. But it runs aground; it doesn't get going. It begins to rely on that sharp pain one gets in the head when one devours ice cream too quickly.
Depressingly, the film goes on to undo all of the good work from the first. Gone are the lessons Dreyfuss learnt, his relationship with Madeleine Stowe's Maria character, of whom was central to the stakeout in the first, is on the brink of terminating and Dreyfuss comes across as all of a sudden obnoxious and unlikeable. Gone too is any sort of rapport between the leads, with the majority of it just three people in a room shouting at each other. Where things worked in the first film, things collapse two-fold here; the sense that these people are at all qualified police officers worthy of the job they're on is suddenly all-but-lost, while the producer's decision to throw in O'Donnell reeks of a panic whereby going bigger and "better" is suddenly the solution to a problem that never existed.
If ever there was an opportunity for a film of this ilk to drive forward with drama and heightened tension, it would be in a situation whereby the restricted view of an area we're aware the importance of is at the forefront of proceedings. In this scenario, a sense of cinema relies on facial expressions; "the image" and, if anything, a LACK of dialogue so as to not distract from the ensuing drama. One's mind boggles at a certain scene whereby Estevez charts the bathroom habits of his newly acquired targets, talking to himself in the process and using specific buzzwords more broadly linked to these excretal activities. It is quite incredible that a fully grown adult was even responsible for the construction of the sequence. And so, the film is a rank failure; one of those rare instances whereby the psychopath who pops up at the end to kill everyone actually gets our vote of approval to just do away with everyone. 2007 German film "The Lives of Others" was a pinnacle of sorts in its depiction of this clandestine world of observing and reporting; of swimming through the trouble of a delicate scenario; of getting under the skin and into the heads of those directly involved in both the observer and the observed. Here, Another Stakeout is the playground humour-ridden mess taking a premise not too dissimilar to the above and turning it into a recipe for unfunny chaos.