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Printer-Friendly ModeJackson not The Man after all
September 12, 2005 —
It is a shame to see movies like The Man. Take a movie going for humor and pair Eugene Levy with Samuel L. Jackson. What could go wrong? A great deal, unfortunately. Does anything go right? Well, here and there, but for every good scene there are four bad ones. After seeing this waste of money and talent, Hollywood will have its work cut out for it in restoring moviegoers' faith in the cop buddy movie formula.
Jackson plays a federal agent based in Detroit whose partner has just been killed. Eugene Levy plays a traveling dental supplies salesman on a business trip to that infamous city. Of course, the two meet up in the most unlikely situation the mind can conjure. It is not so much how they meet as it is how they are forced to stay together that boggles the mind.
Case in point: Jackson, posing as a buyer for a group of out-of-town criminals selling a truckload of guns, is about to enter a diner to meet with one of the sellers. He is told to carry an issue of US Today for identification purposes. Wouldn't you know, Levy is in that same diner already, reading his US Today. The criminal approaches him, gives him a bag containing a gun and a cell phone with which to contact him later. Levy's character, after discovering the contents of the bag, reacts in of course the most inhuman way possible, pulling the gun out and waving it around, panicking everyone and making himself a robbery suspect.
This kind of thing is to be expected in a movie like this. A later scene however, is so out of touch with reality that it's unfathomable. The police show Levy security camera footage of him getting up from his seat and waving the gun around. The camera is pointing directly at the spot where the dealer walked up, sat down, in full view, and gave the gun to Levy. Right there, the story could have be over. Jackson's character knows the dealer would be looking for the guy with the US Today, and the security camera footage would not only reveal the bumble, but also the identity of the dealer, along with incriminating evidence against him necessary for an arrest. Of course, the footage we see only shows Levy waving the gun around. This is only one example of how overly ridiculous the plot of the movie is.
The real tragedy here is that Levy and Jackson are both excellent at what they do, and they do everything possible with the material to make the movie enjoyable. Jackson, as with any movie he ever appears in, has at least two lines that are delivered in a manner that makes it impossible not to laugh. Unfortunately, at least two lines isn't enough. The two also have a good chemistry between them, and in a better movie, would have made quite the memorable pair. Even De Niro probably couldn't do much with a script where a man is operating as a cooperative suspect, and is imbued with full knowledge that he is in the custody of a federal agent, as well as what that entails, and then suddenly tries to steal his car. *insert chase scene here*
The Man is a movie that could have worked if every single person other than the actors were replaced, the script was scrapped, and a new one was written by a fifteen-year-old who happened to like good movies. It doesn't try to do much, and Jackson and Levy do their best, but it still fails on every real level.