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This dark comedy, which reunites director Nora Ephron with the star of her angelic feelgood anthem Michael, has been savaged by many reviewers, but I found it wickedly funny. In his first attempt at intentional comedy in a while (can you believe there’s going to be a sequel to Battlefield Earth?!), John Travolta play Russ Richards, a Pennsylvania TV weatherguy who’s just about the most smarmy, self-absorbed boor in a Bela Lugosi widow’s peak you could ever imagine. He’s leveraged his considerable local popularity into a lavish snowmobile dealership that would rival a Ducati boutique, but in the freakishly warm December of 1988 he’s losing his shirt. With help from sort-of girlfriend Crystal (Lisa Kudrow, making everybody else in all her scenes look nearly as funny as she is), who acts as set dressing for the televised state lottery drawings and is sleeping her way to nowhere in particular, he fixes the ping-pong balls to deal himself a $6.4 million payoff.
Collecting the winnings proves a lot tougher, since everybody else with a hand in the procedure wants a cut, including the strip-club owner who suggested the scam (Tim Roth); the oafish thug who gleefully bludgeons all meddlers (Michael Rappaport); Crystal’s mousy, self-abusing cousin (ambush documentarian Michael Moore); and Russ’s philandering station manager (Ed O’Neill). All the while, an ineffectual cop (Bill Pullman) does his best not to notice the increasingly widening felonious spiral. It’s a quirky, dishonor-among-thieves story (scripted by Adam Resnick, who wrote the indescribably weird Chris Elliot vehicle Cabin Boy) with more double-crosses than a Goth funeral. B
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