MR. DESTINY
Guess what folks? If you guessed that its time once again for everybody’s favorite online idiot to expound upon his incredibly unqualified opinions for your entertainment and enjoyment…then you are absolutely right! …And if you guessed something else entirely…I guess you feel like a real twit just about now!
That’s right; this is everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, here to say: Hello! And welcome to the column! As you already know it is my mission, since I chose to accept it, to look for cool and unusual stuff from the present and the past which you may or may not be aware of and put you in the know! And if you didn’t already know that, you know it now, so I’m already doing a good job so far! Then, I sorta slap on a cockamamie rating, and pass the whole thing off as a legitimate review (so don’t tell the editors the truth, they’d be totally heartbroken!).
This time around I’m talking about a movie from 1990 called “Mr. Destiny”. It was directed by James Orr, and written by James Orr and Jim Cruickshank. But that won’t be the reason you remember it, if you remember it at all. You’ll remember it because Jim Belushi was in it, and so was Michael Caine, back before he got knighted.
Hey, did you know that only two actors in the whole wide world have been nominated for an Academy Award for Acting (either lead or supporting) in EVERY decade from the 1960’s to the 2000s, and one of them is Michael Caine? The other one is Jack Nicholson, but he’s got nothing to do with “Mr. Destiny”.
But there are tons of other recognizable faces in this movie, too! There’s Rene Russo from “Lethal Weapon 3 & 4”. There’s Linda Hamilton from “Terminator 1 & 2”. Jon Lovitz from “Saturday Night Live”. Bill McCutcheon from “Murphy Brown”. Courtney Cox from “Friends” (in a VERY UN-friendly role! …I felt obligated to say that.). Maury Chaykin from “Nero Wolf”. And Hart Bochner who turns out to be the guy in “Die Hard” who got shot for lying to Alan Rickman about knowing Bruce Willis…but you might know him from “The Starter Wife”.
So, Jim Belushi plays Larry Burrows, a fairly unremarkable, average person. He’s got a good heart, a loving wife, and an unremarkable office-cubicle type job. Now, before we go into the real story, we have to flash back to a high school memory of “The Big Game”. Larry played baseball in high school, and he was the make-it-or-break-it hitter during The Big Game. Well, he was psyched up and ready to hit the pitch when there was this weird flash—that apparently only he saw—which caused him to miss the ball and strike out and lose The Big Game. Twenty years later, he still dwells on it.
It’s Larry’s 35th birthday, and everything seems to be going wrong. The contractor working on his house still isn’t done AND asked for more money. He ran out of his favorite breakfast cereal. There was no coffee when he got to work. He ends up looking very foolish in front of the President of the company (the jock who married the Boss’ daughter) and then in front of the Boss’ daughter. Everyone seems to have forgotten his birthday. And while nosing around into some suspicious business dealings, he finds out that the VP of the company is secretly buying up company stock so he can make a fortune by pressuring the owner to sell the company. He gets caught finding this out…and fired. And then, on his way home, his car breaks down.
This movie is a comedy, in case ya can’t tell.
Anyway, he breaks down in front of a bar that at first appears to be closed up, but then the neon sign magically turns on to catch his eye. Larry goes inside and finds the place empty except for Mike the Barman, to whom he tells his troubles to. Larry speculates that his life would have turned out a whole lot different—and better—if he had only hit that baseball back in The Big Game in high school.
So Mike the Bartender fixes him a “special” drink of his own concoction, which he calls “Spilled Milk, the one drink there’s no use crying over”. And when Larry drinks it…SHAZAM! The past is altered! Larry hit that ball and won The Big Game! His life has gone in a completely different direction!
This disorients him more than just a little bit. He doesn’t live at his former address anymore. Instead, he lives in a great big mansion…and he’s married to the Boss’ daughter and has two kids with her!
So Mike, who is some sort of “conscience” or something, explains that Larry hit the ball, so the girl he married never came to comfort him for striking out and they never met. Instead he married the prom queen, and became the president in her father’s company (where he was only a cubicle jockey before).
Apparently he’s had other experiences in this alternate life that drastically changed who he is, because he’s cheating on his wife with his psychotic secretary and apparently in cahoots (that’s a fun word “cahoots”!) with the VP who’s trying to make a fortune by destroying the company. However, our Larry is too preoccupied with finding his former wife…I mean, the wife he never really married…in the other life…or whatever. I can dig it, I just can’t explain it.
He’s terribly disappointed to find out that she’s married to another man, but kinda happy to find their having marital problems. She also works for the same company he does (in fact, everyone he knows and is related to seems to), and she is the steward of the local union, who is upset about the many layoffs and extra workloads that are part of the VP’s money-making scheme. So Larry, as the President of the company, states that he’s willing to give in to the union’s demands if she’ll go out on a date with him.
This, of course, ticks off the VP, who calls Larry’s new wife, the Boss’ daughter, and tells her about the dinner date. Like an idiot, Larry had his psychotic secretary/mistress make the reservations, so now both the women in his new life know that he’s hooking up with some other woman.
His wife, the Boss’ daughter, kicks him out of the house, then calls her father and gets him to fire Larry. The Boss writes a note and plans to leave it in Larry’s office, but he walks in on the VP, who is trashing Larry’s office cuz he plans to kill Larry and make it look like a robbery. The VP accidently kills the Boss and frames Larry for the murder. As the cops are taking Larry out of the office building, his psychotic secretary/mistress shows up and stars shooting at him! Fortunately, she’s a lousy shot, and hits lots of tires and windows and radiators on cop cars, creating a nice distraction for him to get away.
Larry goes directly to the home of the wife from his old life, hoping she’ll run away with him. But instead, his date with her inspired her to try to reconcile with her husband. Before Larry can argue further, the cops start catching up to him.
So he takes off in his fancy sports car for the obligatory (but short) chase scene, which ends with him crashing his car and killing the little dog he had saved from the streets in his other life. …This movie really IS a comedy; I swear it, just a little sadistic here and there!
Anyway, he darts down this alley and just HAPPENS to come out right next to the bar where he first met Mike. So he goes in, but nobody’s there. So he tries to mix some more “Spilled Milk” and is magically brought back to his original life. He thanks Mike profusely “for everything” and gets the tow truck guy to rush him to the board meeting so he can stop the evil VP from ruining the company.
Having saved the day, he goes home where there is a surprise birthday party awaiting him, because nobody forgot his birthday. Meanwhile the President of the company and his wife, Boss’ daughter, show up to thank him for saving the company and to make him the new VP! And since it’s a wonderful life, he presumably lives happily ever after.
Now, I saw this movie back when it first came out on video, and rented it again so I could write this review. I thought it was pretty funny then, and I still do. However, I find that I have a few problems with it nowadays.
In the alternate timeline, Larry Burrows obviously grew into a completely different person. He was cheating on his wife and scamming the company he worked for, both of which our Larry would never do. Except that he did, because he had no emotional connection to the Boss’ daughter and wanted his other wife back. But from his alternate universe perspective it wasn’t cheating, and I can sorta see his point, but at the same time, it’s just wrong. But that doesn’t matter; I don’t have a problem with that part.
My problem is that Larry’s an idiot. See, he’s married to the Boss’ daughter, played by the beautiful Rene Russo. This wife loves him completely. She is beautiful, faithful, attentive, and rich (let’s NOT deny it). Now, not only does he cheat on her, but he stupidly cheats on her with his secretary, who is a complete psycho! In the first 90 seconds that her character is onscreen, you KNOW she’s a wacko to be avoided at all costs!
Further stupidity: When he asks his psychotic secretary/mistress if his original reality wife works there, the secretary cannot find a record of her because we don’t know her new married name yet. But the secretary is mad that he didn’t spend his birthday with her, and threatens him rather plainly if he should get involved with her or any other woman. And yet, he gets this same psychotic secretary/mistress to make the dinner reservations! What a moron!
He is SO obviously in cahoots with the evil VP trying to bust the company, and already KNOWS that’s what the VP is trying to do. But he doesn’t seem to pick up on it in any of the conversations!
I also have a problem with the psychotic secretary/mistress coming to shoot him while the cops are trying to take him away. I mean, I know that there are people like that in real life, but it seems really dumb to me! But it seems really dumb to me when people do that sort of thing in real life, too. You don’t know if they arrested her or not, because she served her purpose by inadvertently causing a distraction so he could get away.
But my biggest problem with the whole thing is that he didn’t make the choice. Usually in stories like this, somebody says “Hey drink this, and your wish will come true.” Or sign this, or eat this, or rub this lamp, or whatever. That way you have to make the bad choice, suffer the consequences, and then overcome them. But Larry Burrows didn’t get to make the choice; Mike just sorta slipped him a mickey.
But it is a neat little movie, pretty funny in places, decent story as long as you don’t sit around thinking about it too much. Also kinda deep in a way, with the whole spiel about little things making a big influence on how your life can turn out. Sort of a metaphysical Butterfly Effect. Sort of a double moral, too, I guess. Partly reassuring you that some things happen for a reason, but also that you can’t just blindly follow Fate; sometimes you have to take an active part in shaping your own destiny. And if that’s too deep for ya, you can just back the movie up and re-watch that pan-shot of Rene Russo in the sexy lingerie for Larry’s birthday. Cuz, hey! At times like that, I don’t mind being shallow!
And now, the time has come, my little friends, to talk of ratings and things. Of course, being the fair-minded and un-biased sort of person that I am, I’m gonna randomly determine a rating by using my handy-dandy D&D percentage dice! Percentage dice, in case ya aren’t in the know, are a pair of ten-sided dice. One die represents the tens place and the other represents the ones place, and together they randomly roll a number anywhere between 01 (think of the worst thing EVER, and this is worse than that), to double-zero which actually means 100 (Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee)!
So I just give the dice a nice, fair roll like that…
Guess what folks? If you guessed that its time once again for everybody’s favorite online idiot to expound upon his incredibly unqualified opinions for your entertainment and enjoyment…then you are absolutely right! …And if you guessed something else entirely…I guess you feel like a real twit just about now!
That’s right; this is everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, here to say: Hello! And welcome to the column! As you already know it is my mission, since I chose to accept it, to look for cool and unusual stuff from the present and the past which you may or may not be aware of and put you in the know! And if you didn’t already know that, you know it now, so I’m already doing a good job so far! Then, I sorta slap on a cockamamie rating, and pass the whole thing off as a legitimate review (so don’t tell the editors the truth, they’d be totally heartbroken!).
This time around I’m talking about a movie from 1990 called “Mr. Destiny”. It was directed by James Orr, and written by James Orr and Jim Cruickshank. But that won’t be the reason you remember it, if you remember it at all. You’ll remember it because Jim Belushi was in it, and so was Michael Caine, back before he got knighted.
Hey, did you know that only two actors in the whole wide world have been nominated for an Academy Award for Acting (either lead or supporting) in EVERY decade from the 1960’s to the 2000s, and one of them is Michael Caine? The other one is Jack Nicholson, but he’s got nothing to do with “Mr. Destiny”.
But there are tons of other recognizable faces in this movie, too! There’s Rene Russo from “Lethal Weapon 3 & 4”. There’s Linda Hamilton from “Terminator 1 & 2”. Jon Lovitz from “Saturday Night Live”. Bill McCutcheon from “Murphy Brown”. Courtney Cox from “Friends” (in a VERY UN-friendly role! …I felt obligated to say that.). Maury Chaykin from “Nero Wolf”. And Hart Bochner who turns out to be the guy in “Die Hard” who got shot for lying to Alan Rickman about knowing Bruce Willis…but you might know him from “The Starter Wife”.
So, Jim Belushi plays Larry Burrows, a fairly unremarkable, average person. He’s got a good heart, a loving wife, and an unremarkable office-cubicle type job. Now, before we go into the real story, we have to flash back to a high school memory of “The Big Game”. Larry played baseball in high school, and he was the make-it-or-break-it hitter during The Big Game. Well, he was psyched up and ready to hit the pitch when there was this weird flash—that apparently only he saw—which caused him to miss the ball and strike out and lose The Big Game. Twenty years later, he still dwells on it.
It’s Larry’s 35th birthday, and everything seems to be going wrong. The contractor working on his house still isn’t done AND asked for more money. He ran out of his favorite breakfast cereal. There was no coffee when he got to work. He ends up looking very foolish in front of the President of the company (the jock who married the Boss’ daughter) and then in front of the Boss’ daughter. Everyone seems to have forgotten his birthday. And while nosing around into some suspicious business dealings, he finds out that the VP of the company is secretly buying up company stock so he can make a fortune by pressuring the owner to sell the company. He gets caught finding this out…and fired. And then, on his way home, his car breaks down.
This movie is a comedy, in case ya can’t tell.
Anyway, he breaks down in front of a bar that at first appears to be closed up, but then the neon sign magically turns on to catch his eye. Larry goes inside and finds the place empty except for Mike the Barman, to whom he tells his troubles to. Larry speculates that his life would have turned out a whole lot different—and better—if he had only hit that baseball back in The Big Game in high school.
So Mike the Bartender fixes him a “special” drink of his own concoction, which he calls “Spilled Milk, the one drink there’s no use crying over”. And when Larry drinks it…SHAZAM! The past is altered! Larry hit that ball and won The Big Game! His life has gone in a completely different direction!
This disorients him more than just a little bit. He doesn’t live at his former address anymore. Instead, he lives in a great big mansion…and he’s married to the Boss’ daughter and has two kids with her!
So Mike, who is some sort of “conscience” or something, explains that Larry hit the ball, so the girl he married never came to comfort him for striking out and they never met. Instead he married the prom queen, and became the president in her father’s company (where he was only a cubicle jockey before).
Apparently he’s had other experiences in this alternate life that drastically changed who he is, because he’s cheating on his wife with his psychotic secretary and apparently in cahoots (that’s a fun word “cahoots”!) with the VP who’s trying to make a fortune by destroying the company. However, our Larry is too preoccupied with finding his former wife…I mean, the wife he never really married…in the other life…or whatever. I can dig it, I just can’t explain it.
He’s terribly disappointed to find out that she’s married to another man, but kinda happy to find their having marital problems. She also works for the same company he does (in fact, everyone he knows and is related to seems to), and she is the steward of the local union, who is upset about the many layoffs and extra workloads that are part of the VP’s money-making scheme. So Larry, as the President of the company, states that he’s willing to give in to the union’s demands if she’ll go out on a date with him.
This, of course, ticks off the VP, who calls Larry’s new wife, the Boss’ daughter, and tells her about the dinner date. Like an idiot, Larry had his psychotic secretary/mistress make the reservations, so now both the women in his new life know that he’s hooking up with some other woman.
His wife, the Boss’ daughter, kicks him out of the house, then calls her father and gets him to fire Larry. The Boss writes a note and plans to leave it in Larry’s office, but he walks in on the VP, who is trashing Larry’s office cuz he plans to kill Larry and make it look like a robbery. The VP accidently kills the Boss and frames Larry for the murder. As the cops are taking Larry out of the office building, his psychotic secretary/mistress shows up and stars shooting at him! Fortunately, she’s a lousy shot, and hits lots of tires and windows and radiators on cop cars, creating a nice distraction for him to get away.
Larry goes directly to the home of the wife from his old life, hoping she’ll run away with him. But instead, his date with her inspired her to try to reconcile with her husband. Before Larry can argue further, the cops start catching up to him.
So he takes off in his fancy sports car for the obligatory (but short) chase scene, which ends with him crashing his car and killing the little dog he had saved from the streets in his other life. …This movie really IS a comedy; I swear it, just a little sadistic here and there!
Anyway, he darts down this alley and just HAPPENS to come out right next to the bar where he first met Mike. So he goes in, but nobody’s there. So he tries to mix some more “Spilled Milk” and is magically brought back to his original life. He thanks Mike profusely “for everything” and gets the tow truck guy to rush him to the board meeting so he can stop the evil VP from ruining the company.
Having saved the day, he goes home where there is a surprise birthday party awaiting him, because nobody forgot his birthday. Meanwhile the President of the company and his wife, Boss’ daughter, show up to thank him for saving the company and to make him the new VP! And since it’s a wonderful life, he presumably lives happily ever after.
Now, I saw this movie back when it first came out on video, and rented it again so I could write this review. I thought it was pretty funny then, and I still do. However, I find that I have a few problems with it nowadays.
In the alternate timeline, Larry Burrows obviously grew into a completely different person. He was cheating on his wife and scamming the company he worked for, both of which our Larry would never do. Except that he did, because he had no emotional connection to the Boss’ daughter and wanted his other wife back. But from his alternate universe perspective it wasn’t cheating, and I can sorta see his point, but at the same time, it’s just wrong. But that doesn’t matter; I don’t have a problem with that part.
My problem is that Larry’s an idiot. See, he’s married to the Boss’ daughter, played by the beautiful Rene Russo. This wife loves him completely. She is beautiful, faithful, attentive, and rich (let’s NOT deny it). Now, not only does he cheat on her, but he stupidly cheats on her with his secretary, who is a complete psycho! In the first 90 seconds that her character is onscreen, you KNOW she’s a wacko to be avoided at all costs!
Further stupidity: When he asks his psychotic secretary/mistress if his original reality wife works there, the secretary cannot find a record of her because we don’t know her new married name yet. But the secretary is mad that he didn’t spend his birthday with her, and threatens him rather plainly if he should get involved with her or any other woman. And yet, he gets this same psychotic secretary/mistress to make the dinner reservations! What a moron!
He is SO obviously in cahoots with the evil VP trying to bust the company, and already KNOWS that’s what the VP is trying to do. But he doesn’t seem to pick up on it in any of the conversations!
I also have a problem with the psychotic secretary/mistress coming to shoot him while the cops are trying to take him away. I mean, I know that there are people like that in real life, but it seems really dumb to me! But it seems really dumb to me when people do that sort of thing in real life, too. You don’t know if they arrested her or not, because she served her purpose by inadvertently causing a distraction so he could get away.
But my biggest problem with the whole thing is that he didn’t make the choice. Usually in stories like this, somebody says “Hey drink this, and your wish will come true.” Or sign this, or eat this, or rub this lamp, or whatever. That way you have to make the bad choice, suffer the consequences, and then overcome them. But Larry Burrows didn’t get to make the choice; Mike just sorta slipped him a mickey.
But it is a neat little movie, pretty funny in places, decent story as long as you don’t sit around thinking about it too much. Also kinda deep in a way, with the whole spiel about little things making a big influence on how your life can turn out. Sort of a metaphysical Butterfly Effect. Sort of a double moral, too, I guess. Partly reassuring you that some things happen for a reason, but also that you can’t just blindly follow Fate; sometimes you have to take an active part in shaping your own destiny. And if that’s too deep for ya, you can just back the movie up and re-watch that pan-shot of Rene Russo in the sexy lingerie for Larry’s birthday. Cuz, hey! At times like that, I don’t mind being shallow!
And now, the time has come, my little friends, to talk of ratings and things. Of course, being the fair-minded and un-biased sort of person that I am, I’m gonna randomly determine a rating by using my handy-dandy D&D percentage dice! Percentage dice, in case ya aren’t in the know, are a pair of ten-sided dice. One die represents the tens place and the other represents the ones place, and together they randomly roll a number anywhere between 01 (think of the worst thing EVER, and this is worse than that), to double-zero which actually means 100 (Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee)!
So I just give the dice a nice, fair roll like that…
… and end up with a 74! Hey, that was a good year!
But that’s just one idiot’s opinion and you don’t have to take it! You could watch the movie yourself and form you very own opinions. Go ahead, it won’t hurt or nothin’! You can rent it from Netflix, I know cuz I did. And you can probably find it in other places for sale or rent, if you are so inclined. And if you not so inclined…it’s probably still available for sale or rent in those places!
However, that seems to bring me to the end of this article. So make sure to come on back next month to find out what I talk about then! I know I can’t wait to find out what it’s gonna be! So be there and be square, cuz this is your buddy Oddcube, signing off!
-----Your Buddy Oddcube
Buy books. Mention this post when ordering any book from a Cyberwizard Productions imprint, and receive 10% off your next order.
But that’s just one idiot’s opinion and you don’t have to take it! You could watch the movie yourself and form you very own opinions. Go ahead, it won’t hurt or nothin’! You can rent it from Netflix, I know cuz I did. And you can probably find it in other places for sale or rent, if you are so inclined. And if you not so inclined…it’s probably still available for sale or rent in those places!
However, that seems to bring me to the end of this article. So make sure to come on back next month to find out what I talk about then! I know I can’t wait to find out what it’s gonna be! So be there and be square, cuz this is your buddy Oddcube, signing off!
-----Your Buddy Oddcube
Buy books. Mention this post when ordering any book from a Cyberwizard Productions imprint, and receive 10% off your next order.
I remember this movie....hell I didnt even think it was funny the first time! You know for some weird reason I thought the bartender was Peter faulk for some reason. Is that weird or what.
ReplyDeleteNo mystery that I am no Jim B. fan. Oh I thought Red Heat had some merit, but not much else.
But thats me...