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 ho is
Cletis Tout?" is a breezy, fast-paced
85-minutes of comedy and mild action, and all of it is harmless. It stars
Christian Slater as Finch, a career criminal in prison for fraud, who decides to
come along after helping to arrange the escape of aging jewel thief Donnelly
(Richard Dreyfuss). In the city with plans to dig up the millions in diamonds
Donnelly had stolen 20 years before, the duo hooks up with Donnelly's daughter
Tess (Portia de Rossi). Things take an unexpected turn when the trio becomes
unwittingly involved with the local mob, which are trying to kill Finch
believing him to be a tabloid journalist name Cletis Tout.
An early assassination attempt on Finch fails, but Donnelly
is killed, thus freeing Richard Dreyfuss to go do other projects. Comedian Billy
Connolly ("Boondock
Saints") has a small but funny role as an M.E. who sells the identity
of the recently deceased Tout to his old buddy Finch, unaware of Tout's current
unfavorable status with the mob. Also on Finch's trail is suave contract killer
Critical Jim (Tim Allen), a hitman whose entire frame of reference for life is
old classic movies. As the film opens, Critical Jim has captured Finch, and to
pass the time until the order to kill comes through, he asks Finch to tell him a
story. Finch then proceeds to tell most of the movie in flashback.
Sometimes funny, sometimes charming, but always with its
tongue firmly in its cheek, "Who is Cletis Tout?" doesn't have much of
an original flair. The only interesting twist, as Critical Jim notes, is when
Finch and Tess discovers that the spot where the diamonds are buried has now
become part of a minimum-security prison. Having broken out of one prison to get
to the diamonds, it now seems Finch must break into another one! This involves
an elaborate (and not too well thought out) plan concerning a videotape that
shows the local mob boss's son killing a hooker during rough sex.
The screenplay by Ver Wiel has touches of Tarantino, in
that people often take time out to sit in one place and converse about banal
subjects like the homosexual nature of the movie "Deliverance" and the
3-Act structure of a movie. Being that Tim Allen's Critical Jim character is a
hitman obsessed with movies, Ver Wiel gets to put some lumps on his own industry
via Jim's "critical" (get it?) analysis of the film industry. It's all
worth a couple of chuckles, but nothing to laugh over. All of "Tout",
in fact, is nothing to laugh over. The film elicits a few chuckles, some smiles,
but it's never successful enough in anything it does to completely win you over.
As a Direct-to-Video victim, "Who is Cletis
Tout?" is actually not a bad movie at all. As previously mentioned, it's
fast-paced, and at 85-minutes of actual movie, the film has almost no extraneous
scenes. The characters are all funny, including the mob's two bumbling hitmen,
who keeps screwing up. (Although in their defense they actually did kill the
right Tout in the beginning.) Gender bending actor RuPaul has a cameo as Tout's
next-door neighbor, and Peter MacNeill is a police Detective investigating the
hooker's murder.
Of note is leading man Christian Slater, who hasn't really
had a lot of good roles since his turn as pirate DJ Harry Hardon in "Pump
Up the Volume", the best Teen Drama that, to this day, remains
shamefully unnoticed by the general public. Australian Portia de Rossi (TV's
"Ally McBeal") is very charming, as is Richard Dreyfuss in what
amounts to a lengthy cameo. His death scene comes pretty early, so it's not much
of a spoiler to mention it. In the movie's funniest bit, Critical Jim asks Finch
if anyone has ever told him that he sounds like Jack Nicholson. (Those who has
seen Slater knows he's the spitting image of a young Jack, not to mention
possessing Jack's exact speech cadence.)
The film is told in non-linear fashion, and at one point
there's even a flashback within a flashback -- a movie gimmick that movie
aficionado Critical Jim mentions with enthusiasm. "Tout" could be
better, and the sudden violence in the film's final minutes is a bit unexpected,
but overall it's a good movie.
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