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The elements are here to craft a wonderful comedy out of Three Amigos, however, the passion is lacking. All great farces need an element of insanity – an energy that declares how important they are! This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever for its own good. Still, the screenshot of the cowboys lamenting around the campfire and getting their horses to sing with them shows where this movie could have gone.
Steve Martin, Chewy Chase, and Martin Short make up the cast. The tone is mostly set by Martin, who seems rather dispassionate about the material and does not help in adopting Short’s manic goofiness from Saturday Night Live. The comical style should have been more Shor-esk. Where did Chase go? He seems to be left floating in the background in a few shots with a few lines and some bewildered reaction shots. The advertisements promised some out-of-control nonsense, only to serve as a lecture on how to overshadow Short, but worse, and manipulate Martin while conveniently neglecting Chase.
The plot: Martin, Chase and Short form the comedy act Three Amigos which loosely resembles the Ritz Brothers. Their previous films have not done well and following their termination by the studio head, Martin, Chase, and Short lose all their benefits overnight.
At the same time, a teenage girl from a remote Mexican village watches Amos on television and believes that their comic adventures are real so she desperately attempts to reach out to them. Believing that the other characters in the story are actually bandits, she tells them to protect her village from the local Armenians. The telegram is interpreted so poorly that the Amigos believe they are being offered a hefty sum of money for a personal appearance and so the Kindly responds without hesitation.
With a series of misunderstandings, the movie drags on until the Amigos realize too late that real bullets are being fired. This movie is already lost upon arrival to Mexico, as it fails to transform the Amigos into captivating characters. Perhaps the creators believed Martin, Chase, and Short would fully deliver – but, that isn’t the case. The best farces are the ones where the audience is in on the joke, not the characters.
The snappily written screenplay is credited to Martin, Lorne Michaels from “Saturday Night Live,” and Randy Newman, who is also responsible for some of the songs (which are hilarious in themselves). It’s hard to understand why a movie would try to satirize a concept that is so ridiculously awful, so a laugh might seem unneeded. The same premise was used in the George Hamilton movie ‘Zorro, the Gay Blade back in 1981. Although it wasn’t a good film, Zorro the gay blade had far more amusing features than Three Amigos, simply because Hamilton had the sense to act in opposition to his own self-confidence.
At this point, no one employs self-satire. Martin appears, and with that condescends to his character. That is in itself a mistake because if the character is stripped of any dignity, there is nothing to play against. Short, who always used to come up with something outlandishly creative on ‘SNL’, appears to disappointingly tame here. Rather, I wanted him to climb a cactus with a lampshade and then head off to that resigned area, where he proceeded to continue making sensible decisions. Chase too, it seems, is mostly absent during most of the movie.
The directorship of the film fell on the lap of Landis, who is such a comedic genius that he directed ‘National Lampoon’s Animal House and ‘Trading Places,’ but did not remember that ‘Animal House’ was not a hit solely due to its slap-stick humor but due to the character and performance zealously possessed by the actor in the role: John Belushi was never Bluto, he was actually playing him. If there is a general rule, I guess it should be that no one should write, act, or direct a farce, and especially not without being ready to regard it with utmost and absurd gravity. It seems that everyone in ‘Three Amigos’ assumes that it is a type of joke of some kind.
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