Two If By Sea

"Movie Magazine International" Review -- Air Date: Week Of 1/17/96

By Monica Sullivan


Sandra Bullock has too much class to be in a witless movie like "Two If By Sea". Remember the 1992 dud "Deception" starring Andie MacDowell and Liam Neeson? Luckily for them, "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Schindler's List" resurrected their careers. Hopefully, Bullock has many better projects lined up that will erase "Two if By Sea" from audiences' memories. The movie warns us early just how dreadful it's going to be. Crime caper comedies are a perfectly acceptable way of killing ninety minutes in a mall. But THIS caper comedy is dead on arrival thanks to some godawful dialogue by Bullock's excruciatingly inadequate co-star, Denis Leary.

Leary is not-repeat-not-funny not even for a second. That's why Warner Bros. dispensed with a press screening, clearly banking that Sandra Bullock's legion of admirers would swarm to see her in anything. If you love her, Bullock does succeed in extracting a smile or two in the course of this wretched mess of a movie. So does one sight gag involving a police station that doubles as a video outlet. But that's it. Yaphet Kotto, undoubtedly dreaming of the days, when he got to play a larger-than-life Bond villain, is wasted as a cop named O'Malley which gives you an idea of Leary's strained sensayuma.

Watching Dennis Leary in this IS slightly less painful than squirming through a root canal, but so is being forced to watch a test pattern at gunpoint. "Two If By Sea" plays nationally this week.

Copyright 1996 Monica Sullivan


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