8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A real dog, February 11, 2003
This review is from: More Dogs Than Bones (DVD)
MORE DOGS THAN BONES is one of those films you pick up in the video rental store when your first, second, and third choices are unavailable. You convince yourself that it looks reasonably clever. Then, after watching it, the self-recrimination is "What was I thinking?"
The film opens as Las Vegas mobster Victoria "Vic" Galleti (Mercedes Ruehl) and her henchmen are packing up a million bucks in Franklins that she'll courier to Los Angeles and turn over to her boss. Vic isn't a warm and sensitive lady. On the way to the airport, she so verbally abuses her driver that, after she's in the air, he drops a dime to LA Detective Darren Cody (Peter Coyote) to tell him Galletti is on the way. Then, so Vic's in-flight entertainment can be the anticipation of arrest, the driver calls her cell phone and tells her that he's ratted. Enjoy the slammer, babe!
Now desperate, Victoria stashes the money in the carry-on of fellow passenger Raj Lukla (Chaim Jeraffi), a visitor from India on his way to LA to visit his cabdriver nephew, Andy (Ajay Naidu). Vic takes note of Andy's address, which is on Raj's bag. Later, after thumbing her nose at Cody, Galleti sends two assassins, Desalvo (Joe Mantegna) and Quinn (Paul Hipp), to recover the swag. After an initial faux pas involving gunplay and mistaken identity, the two thugs confront Andy and Raj only to learn that the former's dog, Socrates (Sarge), trained to pick up luggage with his teeth, has apparently run off with Raj's bag and buried it. And Socrates isn't talking.
After viewing this film with me, my wife remarked that a decent kernel of a plot was lost amidst excessive padding and bad acting. Well, at a run time of 99 minutes, restorative editing might have yielded a 3-star nugget of, say, 10 minutes. Ruehl overacted a character that was potentially the most intriguing. (DeNiro in the role would have been terrific!) Coyote underacted one that was barely credible to begin with. Jerrafi's Raj was pretty much somnolent. Andy and his friends Mary (Debi Mazar), Truman (D.B. Woodside), and Geoff (Glenn Shadix) came across as refugees from an amateurs' acting workshop. The two hoods, Desalvo and Quinn, died premature deaths long before their Big Finale. Even Whoopi Goldberg as Cleo the Caring Animal Control Officer was lifeless and unfunny. Socrates was the most engaging of the lot, but even he was no Rin Tin Tin. And the scene near the film's conclusion involving a constellation of stars shaped like a "9" or a "6", depending on how one looked at it, has to be one of the most excruciatingly stupid things ever put on celluloid.
MORE DOGS THAN BONES is a contemporary parable, best left buried, of greed's corrosive effects on otherwise decent people. Check out a library book instead.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
LOL!, April 16, 2011
This review is from: More Dogs Than Bones (DVD)
This was a good movie. I enjoyed it. It entertained me. It made me laugh. It kept me guessing. I enjoyed the music of Stewart Copland, which is worth an extra star right there.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Kevin Weisman fan says buy it, but cheap, November 21, 2004
This review is from: More Dogs Than Bones (DVD)
I bought this movie solely because Kevin Weisman (a.k.a. "Marshall J. Flinkman" on the TV show, ALIAS) is in it. He isn't one of the headliners, but he has a bigger part than in other movies in his list of credits. If you like Kevin or want to see other stuff he's been in, I recommend this movie, but get it cheaply or rent it. His scenes go well enough and he holds up his end of the movie, which is a side-step from the main action, but it isn't enough to save the film.
The story starts out okay, not hilarious, but with agreeable characters and a good cast. It soon starts going downhill and gains momentum (downhill, that is) as it progresses to a too tidy, too predictable, and overly emphasized lesson-to-be-learned ending. I understand it was the writer's attempt to make the message - Money Corrupts - humorous by getting the characters into temptation's grip one by one, but it wasn't funny. It was painfully obvious who would bite it next and how, like a cheesey horror flick.
I'm giving it two stars only because of Kevin. It was nice not to hunt through a 40 second scene to try to spot him. It's a bigger part and he did it well. Whoopi Goldberg was good, too, though her part was smaller. She was Whoopi.
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