My World of Flops, Major Paymer Case File #177/Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #191 Carpool (1996)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
It took Warner Brothers, New Line and Universal two years, something in the area of one hundred million dollars and four movies to realize something Tom Arnold himself would be only too happy to concede: there is no market for Tom Arnold vehicles.
Despite Arnold’s popularity as a supporting player/sidekick in hits like True Lies and Nine Months, the concept of a smash hit Tom Arnold movie was never going to be anything other than an oxymoron.
A movie could either feature Tom Arnold as its above-the-title marquee attraction or it could be a smash hit. The two were and always will be mutually exclusive. Yet that somehow did not keep the geniuses in the executive suites in the mid 1990s from repeatedly green lighting Tom Arnold vehicles all the same.
If I can give it the very faintest of praise, 1996’s Carpool is a big step up from 1997’s McHale’s Navy, which I recently covered for both Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and My World of Flops because it understands the nature of Arnold’s appeal much better than the flop feature film adaptation of the 1960s sitcom.
Instead of miscasting Arnold as a fast-talking, quick-witted hustler Carpool casts Roseanne’s ex-husband as Franklin Laszlo, a amiable goofball and agreeably stunted man-child who spends the film committing crimes for the very best and most noble of reasons.
From the outside you might be tempted to consider Franklin a bad guy because he does things like abscond with a giant bag of money that does not belong to him while en route to rob a bank to save his failing business and take a harried dad and group of children hostage at gunpoint. Yet a screenplay that feels like the product of unrelenting studio notes to make the character more likable nevertheless establishes Franklin as not just a good guy but the best guy.
That gun he’s using to take people hostage? It’s nothing but a harmless fake. The ill-gotten bag of money? He of course returns it to its rightful owner on account of stealing being immoral and also against the law. Besides, Franklin is only stealing the money so that he can keep the employees of the rundown carnival he owns from being unemployed and able to feed their own families.
Like so many American films, Carpool is terrified of anything resembling moral ambiguity so it introduces Franklin as a lovable scoundrel who accidentally stumbled his way into criminality before establishing him as a goddamn Saint and credit to humanity as a whole.
But before it works way too hard to get us on Arnold’s side Carpool gets off to a deceptively promising start rooted in the hassles and aggravations of everyday life as a husband and dad.
The great David Paymer has a rare lead role as Daniel Miller, a harried husband and dad and that most ubiquitous and tiresome of kid’s movie cliches: a workaholic in desperate need of life lessons because he works hard to support his family as an ad guy (that most soul-sick of cinematic professions) when he should be ditching work constantly in order to make it to every little league practice, ballet recital and birthday party.
Daniel is anxious about the important presentation he will be delivering to gourmet grocery/deli Hammerman’s but when his wife is sick he’s pressed into carpool duty transporting his two boys and some neighbor children to school.
As a dad, I found early scenes of Franklin’s genuine annoyance at the quirks and aggravating eccentricities of the strange children he’s forced to drive to school both funny and relatable.
A pre-stardom Rachel Leigh Cook costars as Kayla, a sexy nymphet introduced in slow-motion in a midriff-baring sexy schoolgirl get-up in a sequence that silently but powerfully conveys, “Get a load of this sweet, sweet piece of hot-ass jailbait!”
Carpool’s unfortunate decision to shamelessly sexualize an underaged girl continues with a horny teenaged boy shamelessly staring down her shirt. The little creep spends the entire film ogling the poor girl and lusting after her and is of course rewarded rather than punished at the end when she becomes his girlfriend.
When Franklin stops in at Hammerman’s to pick up some danishes he stumbles into a robbery further complicated when pretty much everyone in the place other than himself pulls out a gun.
Frankin pulls out a gun that is revealed to be a fake, but not until much later in the movie. Detective Erdman (Kim Coates) pulls out a gun, and, just for laughs, a sassy old lady pulls out a piece as well.
In the craziness Franklin ends up with a big bag of money and takes Daniel and all of the children in his minivan hostage and soon wins their hearts with his fun, laid-back personality, much to the annoyance of his adult hostage.
Over the course of 85 frenetic, achingly predictable minutes Daniel will become infected with Franklin’s lust for life and overgrown kid sweetness and learn that there is more to life than money and professional success.
Franklin doesn’t really need to change because he’s pretty much perfect already. In a kinder, more magical era Carpool director Arthur Hiller directed classics like The Out of Towners and The In-Laws so he should be eminently qualified to handle this kind of frenetic, slam-bang comedy.
Unfortunately Carpool just keeps adding new characters and conflicts to the mix until it has completely lost sight of the amusing observational humor of its opening scenes.
This should be a movie about two very different men thrown together by the randomness of fate who must make the best of a bad situation. Instead it’s a frenzied romp filled with chase scenes through malls and malfunctioning Ferris wheels and children nearly plummeting to their deaths in order to teach dad that if he’s not prepared to throw away his entire career to make his kids smile even once he’s no kind of a dad at all.
It’s always great to see a world-class character actor like Paymer get a chance to take on a lead role but Carpool fails him and his terrific work. It doesn’t do much for Arnold either.
Studios might have thought they were doing Arnold a solid by casting him in the lead role in theatrically released films but they were actually doing him, audiences, and co-stars like Paymer a terrible disservice.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything and get access to original articles AS I write them and plenty more bonus stuff like exclusive cards featuring Felipe Sobreiro’s amazing artwork for the book at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here