Pure Luck (1991)

Brilliant and touching

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

When I saw this rating (5.0/10) on IMDb, I learnt one thing: IMDb ratings reflect NOTHING on the reality of movies. This movie is indeed one of the all-time funniest movies I've seen. It's so cleverly written, witty, and every single cast member has been selected to perfectly suit the role. The lines all come out naturally, and you cannot help but fall in love with this masterpiece. This movie is one of the very few movies I know line by line, and for a reason: Every line is memorable. I seriously cannot get over the totally unfair rating this movie is receiving here on IMDb. Martin Short and Danny Glover give a phenomenal performance, and make copycats out of all the black guy/white guy movies that followed.

There was something very special in the chemistry between French actors Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard that was lacking in the Martin Short, Danny Glover comedy team. In fact, the trio of comedy films that Depardieu and Richard did together was quite funny: Les Comperes, Les Fugitifs, and La Chevre. Each of those films was re-made by Hollywood (Father's Day, Three Fugitives, and Pure Luck) but each unfortunately fell short of the hilarious originals. The original Depardieu character in La Chevre was an impatient take-charge man who always had to exercise self-control in the presence of the guy with bad luck, knowing all the while that he was really the professional private eye and the competent one and forced to play along with the Richard character's self-delusions about his own investigative prowess. Depardieu was the rational Cartesian man who didn't believe in good or bad luck and you had the constant feeling he was about to boil over as the Pierre Richard character continually proved him wrong. I felt there was a more dramatic turnaround in this character's eventual dumbstruck realization that good and bad luck existed in the original comedy. His wide-eyed disbelief at the end when they found the missing girl was an emotional high-point in the original, whereas the American version wasn't nearly as moving. I didn't feel the mounting sense of frustration and aggravation from the Danny Glove character, who played it a little too coolly, in my opinion. Also, Pierre Richard's character in the original approached every incident of bad luck with the same comic serene self-confidence as though it were something completely normal. I didn't get this sense of Barney Fife nerdish swagger as the man who thought he was in charge of the mission from the Martin Short character. Above all, I didn't see the same degree of conflict between the two characters that ended in true affection in the re-make as I saw in the original. They were too nice to each other throughout the film. In the original, the Pierre Richard character tries to physically attack the Depardieu character in the end, but only succeeds in badly hurting himself. The American version doesn't involve this conflict at the end. The characters in the American version didn't seem to have as firm a grasp on who they were. Nonetheless, the idea of the film is very original (a man with total bad luck is the last resort for finding a missing girl who has identical uniform bad luck) and Pure Luck is a film that is a lot of fun to watch. Even though Danny Glover and Martin Short didn't seem to "get" what the characters in the original film were all about, which made it a true comedy classic, they still pulled off funny performances which made for good if not outstanding comedy.

Martin Short and Danny Glover star in PURE LUCK, and the title plus Short should be a tipoff as to the quality of this obvious tax writeoff. Investigator Glover is assigned to find a missing heiress in Mexico and Short is sent along as someone who shares the heiress' constant state of bad luck (running into doors, falling down, etc.). Somehow this is supposed to mean Short will be able to find the lady, who has been kidnapped. I can't imagine anyone sitting through this inept, unfunny flick in a theater. I couldn't finish it on TV. Short has fallen a long, long way from his INNERSPACE days, and Glover simply looks embarrassed. He also mumbles most of his dialog. PURE LUCK makes THE MAN, with Eugene Levy and Sam Jackson playing similar roles, look like CITIZEN KANE. It is fair to say Short's auburn-dyed, permed hairdo in PURE LUCK outperforms Short at every turn. Avoid at all costs.

The original French version "La Chevre" ('the goat', in France a symbol of bad luck), with Pierre Richard and Gerard Depardieu, is much funnier, but I too agree that Martin Short is a great comedian and that this movie works not bad. Anyway I'm sure that a couple like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor would have do a much better job. Wilder also worked in an adaptation of another funny and successful French movie: "The Woman in Red", and it turned into a little masterpiece... For Martin Short "Pure Luck" was the second "French" adaptation after "Three Fugitives" from 1989 with Nick Nolte (in France the original movie starred again the duo Richard-Depardieu).