Mr. Magoo should be boycotted. Not because it ridicules vision-impaired
people, but because it's so unfair to the legacy of the cartoon. Poor Quincy
Magoo, and poor Leslie Nielsen. Brilliant in Airplane! and the Naked
Gun movies, Nielsen has since lent his deadpan delivery and blissfully
absentminded persona to such slapstick clunkers as Spy Hard and
Dracula: Dead and Loving It. But neither of these can compare with the
atrocity that is Magoo.
Acclaimed Hong Kong director Stanley Tong (Rumble in the Bronx) gets
his fight scenes in (Kelly Lynch is a villain with a mean karate chop), and
co-screenwriter Pat Proft (who helped script The Naked Gun) inserts a
few pale imitations of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker jokes. But they both forget
Magoo. Where the cartoon character naively but gracefully slid through life,
the flesh-and-blood Nielsen gets banged up and knocked around like one of the
Stooges. Nielsen is best on the rare occasion when he takes charge, quits
pretending he's Magoo altogether, and becomes Lieutenant Frank Drebin. There's
no reason for the National Federation of the Blind to be upset about Mr.
Magoo -- its members should be thankful they can't see this one.
--Mark Bazer
Full Length Reviews
Mr. Magoo 
Capsule Reviews
Mr. Magoo 
Other Films by Stanley Tong
Rumble in the Bronx 
Supercop 
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