1986's Armed and Dangerous Was Written for Aykroyd and Belushi but Bombed with John Candy and Eugene Levy as Its Leads
Armed & Dangerous began life as a screenplay Harold Ramis wrote for the high-powered duo of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Then Belushi died of a drug overdose, which thew a real monkey wrench in projects written for the Animal House funnyman. Some of these recovered quite nicely, like Ghostbusters, while some lurched to the screen years later in sorry, degraded form.
That was the case with Armed & Dangerous, which was re-conceived as a vehicle for John Candy and his Splash costar Tom Hanks before Hanks left the project and was replaced by Candy’s beloved SCTV compatriot Eugene Levy. John Carpenter was offered the film but had the good judgment to pass; Mark L. Lester, hot off Commando, ended up with the gig.
Ramis was so disgusted by the way his script was bastardized and re-written that he wanted his name off the project as a screenwriter and Executive Producer. He succeeded in losing the credit for Executive Producer but was stuck with a writing credit.
It’s easy to see why Ramis wanted his name off this turkey. The film feels less like Ramis than a bad Ramis knockoff combined with an equally dim Police Academy wannabe. The Ghostbusters and Caddyshack screenwriter was peerless in his ability to craft vehicles around the unique talents of their stars, most notably Bill Murray in Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day but Armed & Dangerous fatally misunderstands the nature of John Candy’s appeal.
He was a teddy bear, a sweetheart, one of the most innately likable comic actors of the past fifty years. He was more than likable; he was lovable. Even when the movies were bad, which was most of the time when Candy was the star, you couldn’t help but love the guy and feel for him when the material inevitably proved unworthy of his talent and preternatural affability.
So it is painful to see him so woefully miscast as a Bill Murray/Steve Guttenberg-style smartass who is sarcastic and glib, violent and needlessly destructive, the kind of guy who is strangling a black man (Tommy “Tiny” Lister) nearly to death to get information one moment and punching a hilariously masculine female body builder in the face the next. Frank is also an improbable womanizer and peeping Tom who doesn’t feel at all ashamed to gawk at the film’s token woman (a just-pre-stardom Meg Ryan, whose fresh-faced radiance is the film’s biggest bright spot despite a nothing role) in a state of undress through a keyhole. Candy isn’t cast intriguingly against type here so much as he’s miscast as a dude who’s less complicated and dark than just an asshole.
Levy is equally ill-served by the material. Even before he’s going undercover in a porno store as a mincing caricature of a swishy leather daddy in tight in assless chaps it’s achingly apparent that, lead role in a major studio film or not, this was not a good choice for Levy.
In a characteristically under-achieving vehicle, Candy plays Frank Dooley, a good cop who busts some of his fellow officers in the sexy, glamorous and mysterious crime of the century: stealing televisions. Frank takes being a cop as seriously as Arthur Fleck, the titular star of the abysmal stinkeroo Joker, takes his job as a sign spinner.
But just like that poor, innocent martyr, Frank ends up getting punished rather than rewarded for his ferocious, borderline pathological dedication to his job. He’s framed for television thievery and loses his badge and his job, and only barely holds onto his freedom when prosecutors decide to have mercy on the devoted lawman and drop criminal charges against him.
They have fun!
The disgraced former cop ends up applying for work at Guard Dog Security, where he meets fellow oddball Norman Kane (Levy), a smart and knowledgable man but a terrible lawyer who agrees to abandon the field of law in exchange for his white supremacist client getting the harshest possible sentence.
The fired cop and prematurely retired lawyer are partnered and given a job guarding a warehouse that is robbed by masked men Anthony Lazarus and Clyde Klepper, who just so happen to be their shady union representatives.
Lazarus and Klepper are played with just the right note of understated menace by Jonathan Banks of Breaking Bad and ubiquitous character actor Brion James. Banks and James are both known for their baldness so it’s a little disconcerting seeing them both with full heads of hair.
It’s similarly jarring seeing a very young Lister in an early role where he’s still large and muscular but had not yet acquired the Incredible Hulk physique that would become his trademark in movies like Friday.
Armed & Dangerous takes a strong anti-union stance. The all-powerful security guard union steals from its members in two distinct but overlapping ways: there are the exorbitant union dues that attract the attention and ire of the legal-minded Norman Kane even before he and Frank uncover a criminal conspiracy to embezzle union dues and then use the money to buy drugs. But they also quite literally steal from their members by flat-out robbing the businesses where they work.
Frank and Norman launch an investigation into their crooked union that implicates union president Michael Carlino (Robert Loggia) and Captain Clarence O’Connell (Kenneth McMillan), the father of their boss Maggie Cavanaugh (Meg Ryan). Meg Ryan was not yet America’s quirky sweetheart when she made Armed and Dangerous but she was nevertheless insanely adorable. That’s really the only word to describe her here. Alas, Armed and Dangerous can’t think of anything for her to do beyond radiate atomic-level cuteness.
She’s ostensibly the love interest of the lawyer, which feels like a remnant of the time in the film’s long, tortured development when Tom Hanks was supposed to play the role. Call me crazy, but I think Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan would actually make a pretty nifty onscreen duo but her half-assed semi-romance with a characteristically goofy Levy feels, like so much of the movie, like an afterthought.
The investigation hits a nadir when, through circumstances too stupid to recount, Frank and Norman end up in a pornographic bookstore going undercover as a ragingly stereotypical gay man and a woman respectively. The look of mortification on Candy and Levy’s faces seems to belong more to the actors stuck in singularly lousy roles than the sloppily conceived characters they’re playing.
Armed & Dangerous is one of those mismatched buddy cop movies that labors under the delusion that anybody gives a mad-ass fuck about its plot beyond its capacity to set up cool stunts or exciting action set-pieces, two of the many places where the film is sorely lacking.
Director Lester seems to think his primary job as director is to hit all the expected beats in the rote labor union-embezzlement scheme and not to glean laughs from the built-in chemistry of his preposterously gifted stars, who had been making people laugh together for nearly a decade as two mainstays of the SCTV and, to a much lesser extent, various film properties.
Armed & Dangerous goes full-on Cannon in its last fifteen minutes or so, after Frank commandeers a tanker truck from an ingratiatingly nutty hillbilly trucker played with demented redneck energy by Steve Railsback, who gets an “AND” credit for playing a character known only as “The Cowboy.” Railsback is best known for his star-making turn as Charles Manson in the Helter Skelter mini-series and as the brooding, dangerous title character in Richard Rush’s 1980 masterpiece The Stunt Man.
Railsback is clearly having a blast playing a gleeful caricature of a trucker overjoyed to be experiencing the wild ride of a lifetime; Lester seems much more in his element orchestrating explosions and choreographing mayhem than he does trying to eke laughs from this exhausted material.
Somewhere between conception and execution, this action-comedy about mismatched partners trying to crack the big case and redeem themselves professionally decided to forego the whole “comedy” part of the equation in favor of delivering the stock action they imagine audiences crave.
On paper, Armed and Dangerous radiates promise: a screenplay credited to Ramis during the peak of his creative powers, all-time greats Candy and Levy in lead roles, Meg Ryan at the height of her adorability, a murderer’s row of great character actors that includes Loggia, Banks, Brion James, Lister, McMilan, Don Stroud, Back To the Future’s James Tolkan, Larry Hankin and Railsback, and finally, a director coming off Commando, one of the best-loved action movies of the 1980s.
Yet Armed and Dangerous is every bit as uninspired and tired as its reputation suggests. It’s a laughless slog that feels interminable despise a running time well under 90 minutes.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure