LOOK WHO'S TALKING NOW. Directed by Tom Ropelewski; written by Tom Ropelewski and Leslie Dixon; produced by Jonathan D. Krane for TriStar. Starring Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and the voices of Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton. Rated PG-13.
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And they say there's no such thing as yankee ingenuity anymore! How else to explain getting three movies out of one joke! And at least the first two were pretty successful, at that.
In the current installment, however, the one joke is stretched awfully thin. Moving from "talking" baby humans to "talking" adult dogs is a logical progression, I suppose. And at least one of the canines, the mutt with DeVito's voice, gets some good lines.
But the dog story has to compete with a kind of romantic triangle story. Each plotline has one performer who turns in a better job than the material deserves—Alley for the humans and DeVito for the dogs. But the rest of the cast, and the stories themselves, don't have much to recommend them.
James (Travolta) lands a cushy job as pilot for a glamorous cosmetics mogul (Lisette Anthony) the same day that Mollie (Alley) loses her accounting job. That his boss has designs on him, sexual harassment-wise, is obvious (to us, anyway) from their first meeting. Which just makes Mollie's unemployment (and later worst job scenario, as a Christmas elf) that much harder for her to take.
Alternating with long sequences about the adults' problems are shorter bits concerning the two dogs, Rocks the mutt and Daphne the pampered poodle.
Alley is a gifted comedienne who is at her best with the kind of frazzled near-hysteria that defines Mollie's character. And DeVito's terrific at playing human mutts; he could do Rocks in his sleep. Consequently, when either of these people are talking, the movie is pretty entertaining.
But the script (which contains not a single unanticipated event) and the rest of the cast (even the usually entertaining Keaton), who are uniformly lackluster, make Look Who's Talking Now pretty much a dog.
November 17, 1993