Narrow Margin (1990)
3/10
Maxwell Smart meets low-budget James Bond
8 January 2015
Warning: Spoilers
This film was almost constantly annoying. The main character, supposedly an ex-Marine, manages to get his hands on actual guns several times, which might well have evened up the odds a little in his attempts to escape the assassins sent to kill his charge, so of course the screenwriter inserted bits of business each time to let the "hero" screw it up. He loses one gun whilst he stops to preen himself in a mirror, t'other whilst he tosses off a quip evidently meant to display the screenwriter's facility with Bondish repartee, and is so stuck on himself that he fails to notice when the obvious decoy on the train makes goo-goo eyes at him, ignoring countless real hunks in the process, and so sets up the mandatory denouement in which the decoy (quelle surprise!) acts out the perfect "villain taunting the hero" scene and is vanquished mid-taunt, whilst Bond... pardon... one or another of the Marx Brothers, utters the perfect quip, which in real life would have allowed the decoy to escape and kill both witness and the main character, but of course it doesn't, since the screenwriter couldn't let that happen, so it didn't, but only through brute force, wrestling a happy ending out of a bloody mash-up.

I don't mind a little suspension of disbelief, but I prefer honest slapstick to whatever the heck this was.
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