Two Of A Kind review
Ever since their sensational appearance together in “Grease” five years ago, the careers of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John have been going steadily downhill.
In “Two of a Kind” they take a nosedive so severe that one wonders if they’ll ever be seen in films again, together or separately. For this is a leaden whimsey about two unlikable New Yorkers who come up trumps in the end to prove humanity is not irredeemably corrupt.
It seems God has taken a 25-year vacation, leaving Heaven in the charge of some unlikely angels, including Charles Durning, Beatrice Straight and Scatman Crothers. How the unseen Deity (voice, I’m afraid, by Gene Hackman) spent His sabbatical is unclear. Maybe He’s been boning up on Shakespeare, whom He tiresomely quotes from time to time (you’d think Milton would be more up His alley).
At any rate, He has in mind a second Flood to rid the earth of humanity (including one hopes, moviemakers), but is dissuaded by the angels, who plead for a week in which to find at least two upright people who would sacrifice all for each other.
So from celestial scenes that look like a road-company production of “The Green Pastures,” we descend to New York’s Museum of Natural History, where inventor Zack Melon (John Travolta) is wondering what to do about the mobsters on his tail.
One of them says Zack only Invents such “gimmicks for idiots” as edible sunglasses and he isn’t far off. In fact, the whole movie could be thus described.
With the heat on him, Zack dons a Goldilocks wig to rob a bank. There he runs into Debbie (Olivia Newton-John, looking suitably gaunt and unhappy) as a teller. It seems she yearns to become an actress, but has a long, long way to go. She makes off with the $15,000 earmaked for Zack, and the game - a very tedious one - is afoot.
The film takes us through a series of painful double entendres, a pie-throwing fracas in a wildly implausible Plaza restaurant, and the sort of adolescent camera trickery last seen in the Pete Smith specials that used to eke out newsreel programs a half-century ago.
And it’s no help at all to have Oliver Reed hamming it up as the Devil.
One can only hope this feeble fable, writ-ten and directed by John Herzfeld, will not permanently damage two once-promising careers.
By Richard Freedman of Newhouse News Service