My World of Flops Inconceivable Case File #158 Junior (1994)
Even I am a little surprised that it has taken me twenty-six years to watch and write about 1994’s Junior, the notorious flop where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a brilliant but dispassionate science who becomes pregnant to test an experimental fertility drug. True, I have devoted the last thirteen years of my life and career to a deep dive into the fascinating world of the woeful and legendarily misbegotten through this column and its book spin-off but I will concede that the thought, “I ain’t seeing that shit” goes through my head sometimes.
That has been my attitude towards Junior through the decades. When it was released in theaters and I saw that notorious poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger with a big pregnant belly and a look that combines shock and mortification while Danny DeVito, grinning like the cat that ate the canary, presses a stethoscope to his belly with an express that screams, “Can you BELIEVE this? It’s Arnold! And he’s PREGNANT!” while a badly photoshopped Emma Thompson leans on Arnold’s shoulder with a bland smile that indelibly expresses the sentiment, “And I’m the girl!” my first thought was “I ain’t seeing that shit!”
Later I would encounter Junior at the video store and think “I ain’t seeing that shit.” Then I became a professional writer who specialized in writing about the worst and most disastrous movies ever made and I seriously considered writing about Junior, on account of it being such a flop and that skeptical and consistent voice inside my head once peeped up to say, “I still ain’t seeing that shit.”
Today is the very last day of Danny DeVito Month, however, and I want a juicy article and film to go out on so today I finally found myself thinking, “Well, I guess the time has finally come for me to see that shit.”
Junior reunited the stars (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito) and director (Ivan Reitman) of the blockbuster Twins for another light comedy with a painfully high-concept premise so zany it all but demands to be followed by an exclamation point, a question mark and another exclamation point. The mismatched twins comedy Twins should have been titled Twins!?! cause, I mean, c’mon, how fucking goofy is it that ARNOLD and Danny DeVito are twins! They look NOTHING alike! Junior, meanwhile, has an appropriately bland and juvenile title but really should have entered theaters under the name A Pregnant Man!?!
Junior makes an endless series of mistakes, beginning with the bizarre miscasting of one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time as a scientist as brilliant as he is clammy and unpleasant. True, Schwarzenegger played another scientist with a complicated domestic situation to universal acclaim and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the 1997 blockbuster Batman & Robin but Arnold’s performance as an egghead here got a much chillier reception. Critics gave Junior the cold shoulder. The response of a public that adored its stars’ previous collaboration was even icier.
I ain’t seeing this shit!
To transform Mr. Olympia into Dr. Science the filmmakers dress him up all fancy like in smart suits that mask his bodybuilder physique and bifocals that change his look and his face so dramatically that for the first ten minutes of the movie I did not even recognize the Terminator star. I just assumed that some cerebral public intellectual type like Wallace Shawn had started lifting weights until I realized that it was actually Arnie behind those glasses.
In Junior Arnold plays Dr. Alex Hesse, a research geneticist who invents a drug to help prevent miscarriages with the assistance of his partner, gynecologist Dr. Larry Arbogast (Danny DeVito).
It’s easier to buy Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as twins and Schwarzenegger as a man becomes pregnant and has a baby than it is to believe they’re both scientific and medical geniuses, and the leads’ jobs are not supposed to be the comic or outrageous element of the film.
Noah Banes (Frank Langella), the evil, bow-tie-sporting head of the review board cuts off their funding and kicks them out of the lab to make space for Dr. Diana Reddin (Emma Thompson), a wacky, accident-prone geneticist genius and an unmistakable Manic Pixie Dream Girl type who meets cute when the zany doc is flung off the top of a frozen embryo container and lands on top of Arnold’s bewildered doctor.
She then proceeds to kiss the stranger she has landed on the lips, hard, repeatedly. Call me a scold or a puritan if you must but I think you should know someone for longer than twenty or thirty seconds before you start kissing them insistently on the mouth. Also, consent is important, and also essential, but not if you’re in a movie as dumb as Junior apparently.
Dr. Reddin is the product of screenwriters who figured they cracked the code on how to write a great female character by asking, “What if a woman was beautiful and desperately in love with the male lead but also—and here’s the crazy part—a total klutz? That way she’d be beautiful, of course, but also relatable and hilarious!”
Pure nightmare fuel
In a bind, Dr. Larry proposes something radical, if not outright revolutionary: what if they tested this pregnancy drug not on a woman but rather a man, namely Dr. Hesse? Absolutely nothing about Hesse suggests he would be at all amenable to carrying a baby in his body but he acquiesces immediately because there would be no movie otherwise.
After becoming pregnant, Dr. Hesse makes a remarkable if eminently predictable transformation from emotionally frigid, cold-hearted loner to big-hearted mensch. He goes from being Mr. Freeze to Mr. Warmth, from a scientist without emotions to a beaming, glowing expectant parent who is all gooey, gushing emotions and baby fever.
The character’s evolution is not slow or subtle by any means. This is not a gradual thaw that finds someone with an icebox for a heart waking up to their long-buried humanity. One minute Dr. Hesse is humorless man of the intellect. The next he’s complaining that everyone is rushing around in a furious hurry when, in his estimation at least, “We should be pausing to hear the joyful melody of life itself!”
Junior hits all the expected beats. Dr. Hesse is suddenly overcome with cravings for weird, unlikely combinations of food! His nipples are crazy sensitive! Watching anything sappy makes him weep like a baby! He’s positively glowing from within! He’s horny all the time, with a big old Austrian boner that will not go down!
More than anything, being pregnant turns the protagonist into a good person immediately, and dramatically, and permanently. I did not mind a bit because the pregnant doctor’s instant switch from coldly ambitious man of science to joyful expectant parent affords Schwarzenegger an opportunity to be funny and charming and warm and all of the other qualities that have made him such a beloved icon.
Arnold spends much of the film’s third act in drag, looking for all the world like Mrs. Doubtfire’s even less convincing Austrian cousin, as he hides out in a home for expectant mothers. Dr. Hesse and Dr. Larry are convinced they need to hide Hesse’s pregnancy or they’ll be the laughingstocks of the scientific community instead of winning a fucking Nobel Prize for their revolutionary breakthrough.
Only sinister Noah Banes, the villain this light pregnancy comedy does not need or want sees the financial and publicity value in a dude giving birth to a healthy child; everyone else sees that as way less impressive, or lucrative than developing a more effective pregnancy drug.
Junior is a lot more fun once Arnold stops being an asshole and becomes a baby-mad doting dad whose worldview and world instantly become a whole lot sunnier once impending parenthood enters the picture. Junior is never funny but it is intermittently very nice and very sweet as well as very misbegotten.
Junior has roughly 300 percent more plot than it needs. It’s positively brimming with characters and developments begging to be left on the cutting room floor. In a particularly egregious example, DeVito’s Dr. Larry is supposed to procure an anonymous, random egg to put inside his professional partner but instead grabs a nearby embryo that, in an astonishing, unlikely yet strangely inevitable development, just so happens to belong to Dr. Diana Reddin, the woman Dr. Hesse is in love with.
Reddin is understandably surprised and concerned to discover that, in a somewhat unrealistic, even convoluted series of events, the strapping, muscle-bound Austrian man she lusts for is not only pregnant but pregnant with her baby and her egg.
In an even more unnecessary subplot, Dr. Hesse’s pregnancy coincides with Dr. Larry’s ex-wife Angela (Pamela Reed, Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop co-star) getting pregnant by someone touring with Aerosmith. We’re led to believe she’s carrying Steven Tyler or Joe Perry’s baby, or at least the unborn child of Joey Kramer, Brad Whitford or Tom Hamilton when she’s actually pregnant with the band’s personal trainer.
The other pregnancy subplot adds nothing to the film. Junior is not a scientific experiment that requires a control group to contrast with the big experiment but a light comedy that’s way too fucking long already and Reed’s big moment involves stumbling upon her ex-husband lovingly stroking Dr. Hesse’s pregnant belly, mistaking them for homosexual lovers, then fainting in shock when she discovers just what her former hubby and his partner are up to.
Junior would be a lot easier to recommend or forgive if it were not 109 minutes. 109 minutes! That’s nearly a half hour longer than the last two movies I’ve seen, Stuart Gordon’s The Re-Animator and Stuck, both of which managed to tell a captivating, recognizably human story in 85 minutes or less.
Not Junior, however. It seems to last as long as most pregnancies. Arnold certainly has his moments here but otherwise this comedy about an unlikely conception and an even more improbable delivery is terminally, fatally misconceived.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place in an unhappy time by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
And of course you can buy an autographed copy of my new book, The Weird Accordion to Al, by sending m twenty dollars via PayPal at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net
Or you can buy it online at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews if you’d prefer