Gun Shy

There’s one actor I can think of at the moment who’s interesting enough to make even the most questionable movie worthwhile: Benicio Del Toro. He’s shown that he can not only turn a supporting part in a good film into a major upstaging, as in The Usual Suspects and Basquiat, but also enliven markedly lesser things such as De Niro’s otherwise forgettable bleacher-rage romp The Fan, and the sole fruit of Alicia Silverstone’s abortive post-Clueless dive into vanity self-producing, Excess Baggage. Fortunately he’s got three or four new movies coming in the next few months, including Guy Ritchie’s follow-up to his stunning directorial debut Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels, the equally promising Snatch’d.

Benicio Del Toro is not in Gun Shy. But it does have a couple people I’d go see in almost anything: Oliver Platt, who is one of the few actors around capable of inspiring scene-stealing laughter simply with his body language (and that doesn’t mean attempting to speak through a non-speaking orifice, like someone else we could mention), and Sandra Bullock, she of the smile that could start and end a war. They co-star with Liam Neeson, who plays undercover DEA agent Charlie Mayo. Charlie recently had a narrow escape from a very messy end when his cover was blown, scant weeks before impending retirement. Now he’s thoroughly spooked about following through on a painstakingly established plan to stop Fulvio “the Jeffrey Dahmer of hit men” Nestra (Platt) and a cartel cocaine lord from setting up a Mafia/Colombian money-laundering axis. All this tension has generated extreme lower g.i. problems (why don’t all the screenwriters with a penchant for flatulence humor get together and start their own cable network – Imodium TV – so people who want to watch that sort of thing can know where to find it and the rest of us won’t have to be bothered?), sending him first to a psychotherapist and then to a gastroenterologist. At the latter’s office he meets Judy (Bullock), a holistic nurse determined to help him through this rough patch, as are Charlie’s fellow group-therapy patients and the unexpectedly soft-hearted Fulvio.

I did said “almost anything,” right?

Gun Shy was released cinematically last February, earning not much more than ten percent of its $10 million budget. Though it enjoyed a widespread promo campaign, it showed on only a handful of screens, perhaps because the studio had little confidence in something that Bullock produced but wound up having a rather small onscreen part in. It’s left to Platt to try and carry the affair, which he does, but apparently he didn’t think to lift it using just his legs because even his previously unsullied reputation, which managed to survive both Lake Placid and Ready to Rumble reasonably healthy, comes out looking a little sprained. C

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