Twins

Ivan Reitman – 1988 – USA

I guess this is one of those “you had to be there” kind of movies that seemed much better in their day but suffer badly as time marches on.  The movie is basically a sketch crafted from a single gimmick that for some reason is stretched to feature length.  The gimmick, of course, is the hilarious incongruity of Aryan bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger and the diminutive, chubby Italian-American Danny DeVito being portrayed as long-lost brothers.  You can chuckle at that wacky premise just reading it on paper, and you’ll have laughed just as much as after seeing the whole film.  To make matters worse, Reitman, who obviously recognized the sparseness of the concept, had so little faith in its comedy potential that he supplements it with heartwarming melodrama and even a dead serious shootout with gangsters in the story’s last act.  What especially irks me after all this time is that Reitman prevailed upon his fellow Canadian and one-time colleague David Cronenberg to change the name of his great masterpiece from Twins to Dead Ringers, just because it was coming out around the same time.  As a basic courtesy, Reitman should have bowed to the superior auteur and voluntarily changed the name of his film instead.  Unfortunately, the film was a huge hit, leading to Reitman, Schwarzenegger and DeVito all reuniting for the even worse Junior (1994).