My World of Flops Multiple Personalities, Minimal Laughs Case File #160: Loose Cannons (1990)
Fun fact: that is, in fact, Andy Dick on the poster but he is not in the film. Apparently he was just a poster model, which is something I did not know existed until just now.
Director Bob Clark had one of the more bewildering careers in film history. As a young filmmaker Clark helped create the modern slasher movie with the Yuletide horror classic Black Christmas, a fright flick so nice they remade it twice, in 2006 and 2019.
Clark went on to launch the teen-sex comedy boom of the 1980s, for which he will have to answer before God, with the surprise blockbuster Porky’s in 1981 before creating one of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time in 1983’s A Christmas Story.
Clark left an indelible mark on pop culture with two very different but very beloved and iconic Christmas perennials. Yet he’s also made films so staggeringly, astonishingly awful that it’s hard to believe that they could be the product of the same mind that gave the world A Christmas Story.
Clark soiled his already spotty reputation by ending his career with the one-two punch Baby Geniuses and its somehow infinitely more embarrassing sequel, which I wrote about for The Zeroes, my column at Rotten Tomatoes where I write about movies deemed so universally dreadful that not even a single critic recognized by the powerful review aggregator gave them positive reviews.
Baby Geniuses 2 astonishingly did not mark the first time Clark got the dreaded Zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes for a high-concept Nazi-themed stinkeroo. In 1990 Clark dabbled in the mismatched buddy cop subgenre with the universally reviled mental illness-themed wacky action-comedy Loose Cannons and scored a big old goose egg with critics for his efforts.
The sad and remarkable thing about Loose Cannons, the first film in Mismatched Buddy Cop Movie Month here at the Happy Place, is that Clark isn’t even one of the more auspicious members of its creative team. The stars of Loose Cannons, after all, are Gene Hackman, invariably one of the greatest films actors of his generation and two-time Academy Award winner, and Dan Aykroyd, the Oscar-nominated mind behind Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers and much of the original, endlessly mythologized and romanticized Saturday Night Live. Also, he knows about aliens and shit. Hell, he may even know some aliens personally That is a very specific, very impressive kind of smart.
Clark has a screenwriting credit on Loose Cannons, as does Richard fucking Matheson, one of the most prolific and accomplished science-fiction writers of all time, an absolute giant in the field whose resume includes writing sixteen episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, the screenplays for Roger Corman’s Poe cycle, the teleplay and the short story that inspired Steven Spielberg’s career-making television movie Duel, the novel The Last Man on Earth, the teleplay for The Night Stalker and a whole bunch of other stuff that will make it seem absolutely insane that this lukewarm garbage came from the mind of one of genre fiction’s true masters. Matheson co-wrote the script with his son, so if you’re feeling charitable you can chalk up his participation to wanting to spend time with his family. Also, money.
I’m not sure a timeline exists where critics or audiences responded to Loose Cannons with anything other than revulsion and horror but the ever so slightly overqualified brain trust behind this brainless debacle did not make it easier for themselves by making the movie’s MacGufffin a secret sex film of Hitler doing butt stuff.
Hackman sleepwalks agreeably through the fiendishly unchallenging role of MacArthur Stern, an old-fashioned vice cop who is crude dude perpetually in a rude mood. He’s essentially Al Bundy with a badge, a smartass with heart, a straight arrow just a little bit of tune with the crazy modern world.
Dom DeLuise is the Joe Pesci of this movie, only he’s loud and unfunny.
When everyone who has seen a sex tape involving Hitler having sex with some of his young officers turns up dead Mack is partnered with Det. Ellis Fielding (Dan Aykroyd). Ellis was a dedicated and brilliant officer who developed what is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder as a coping mechanism after being tortured, abused and nearly beaten to death by drug dealers in the line of duty.
In Loose Cannons, having Dissociative Identity Disorder, or Multiple Personality Disorder, as it is referred to here, is like being a werewolf, The Incredible Hulk or Dr. Jekyll. Unless he’s triggered, Ellis is a milquetoast, bow-tie sporting intellectual with a brilliant analytic mind that only partially compensates for his complete lack of social skills.
When he’s triggered, however, Ellis hulks out. He turns into a beast of zaniness, a monster of misplaced mirth, a Mr. Hyde of hackneyed hijinks. He transforms instantly and dramatically into a cross between Robin Williams in the midst of a righteous coke jag in 1978 and a Navy SEAL with the reflexes and instincts of a ninja.
Ellis’ machine-gun patter begins to resemble a television flipping through channels at a breakneck pace as the outrageously mentally ill super-cop flips through impression upon impression upon impression. Snagglepuss! Dirty Harry! Popeye! The entire crew of the USS Enterprise! Snagglepuss again! More Snagglepuss! He REALLY loves doing Snagglepuss!
What triggers Ellis’ Dissociative Identity Disorder? Why violence and speed of course.
Now, if I had a VERY serious, not to mention HILARIOUS mental illness whose triggers include violence and high speeds I could not imagine a worse job than one where you are given a GUN and implicit permission to kill people with it and a SIREN you can use in case you need to drive your car a hundred and twenty miles an hour while pursuing a suspect.
But Loose Cannons would not exist if people behaved rationally. For example, it seems extremely likely that Mack would be more understanding about his new partner’s eccentricities if his boss just explained that Ellis developed Dissociative Identity Disorder as a survival mechanism.
In Loose Cannons, Dissociative Identity Disorder is alternately a serious, real condition born of trauma, abuse and intense mental illness and a wacky party trick that affords Aykroyd an opportunity to show off his gifts for manic impersonation, freewheeling improvisation and pop culture riffing in a laughless parade of empty virtuosity.
Instead, the police brass apparently assumed that they didn’t need to tell Mack about his new partner’s issues on the questionable logic that he’ll be fine as long as he is not subjected to any violence, stress or car chases over the course of a MURDER INVESTIGATION involving Nazis of both the modern-day and old school variety.
Alas, the well-worn conventions of the mismatched buddy cop movie dictate that the future buddies must start out hating each other based on their wildly different personalities. So Mack initially hates Ellis because he thinks he’s an effete snob who becomes not just another person but seemingly everyone in pop culture when stressed solely to be irritating.
Name a more iconic duo!
Ellis lives in an all-white apartment and listens only to nature sounds to keep from getting triggered. Yet the first night that Mack spends in Ellis’ apartment after his own burned down he hears his partner screaming in agony in a dozen scrambled, angry, confused voices, a prisoner to his demons and his disease. The night terrors of a man overcome with trauma are played for laughs, of course, because mental illness is an automatic gut-buster, but we’re also supposed to feel for Ellis, which speaks to one of the film’s many fatal flaws: if we take Ellis’ illness seriously, then there’s nothing funny about external manifestations of his trauma and if we don’t, then it’s still brutally unfunny.
Once Mack learns that Ellis’ personality/multiple personalities are a response to almost inconceivable trauma and the traumatized genius cop lets him stay at his home the tension dissipates almost immediately, giving way to friendship and a tight professional bond. Ellis is the ultimate cop whose methods are unconventional but successful: pretending to be popular cartoon bird The Road Runner during times of danger might not be “by the book”, but hot damn if it doesn’t work.
To give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, I suppose you could argue that Ellis goes from violence-averse dandy to preternaturally skilled master fighter when he’s having an episode for the same reason mothers sometimes get a surge of strength and adrenaline and are able to perform feats of astonishing strength when their lives, or the lives of their babies are in danger.
Oh no, it’s about to happen! He’s about to CHANGE!
You have to perform some real mental gymnastics for Loose Cannon’s plot to make any sense. It’s not worth it. Loose Cannons’ plot does not hold up to the tiniest bit of scrutiny, which wouldn’t be a problem if it had anything going for it.
Suffering through Loose Cannons, I found myself wondering if there was anybody who could have made something out of material this dire. Gene Hackman, Dan Aykroyd, Bob Clark, Richard Matheson and producer Aaron Spelling (yes, that Aaron Spelling, Tori’s dad) sure did not.
Then it hit me: John Waters. Instead of steering this tacky idiocy in the direction of lazy formula, Waters could play up the vulgarity and camp and offensiveness at the film’s core and come up with something dazzling and demented in its contempt for propriety and good taste. I’m not sure if a theoretical, John Waters-directed Loose Cannons would be good, necessarily, but it would undoubtedly be memorable and distinctive, two things Clark’s gauche muddle most assuredly are not.
Loose Cannons needed an exquisite vulgarian like Waters. Instead they got someone who was merely crass.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND of course you can, and should buy the Happy Place’s first proper book, The Weird Accordion to Al, a lovingly illustrated guide to the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic with an introduction by Al himself here
Alternately, you can buy signed copies of both my new books, The Weird Accordion to Al and Postal, together, signed, for a reduced rate here.