Pink Cadillac

556/57 (7-13-89)
You don't mess with a man's vehicle," says Clint Eastwood in an all-too-obvious attempt to coin a new slogan to vie with Dirty Harry's "Make my day." The attempt is feeble. So's the movie, an overlong, undercooked action comedy made out of retooled parts from other film vehicles. Eastwood stars as a skip tracer; that means he rounds up bail jumpers the way Robert De Niro did in Midnight Run. His target is Bernadette Peters: She plays a good-hearted ditz hitched up with the wrong guy, the way Michelle Pfeiffer was in Married to the Mob. Peters's husband (Timothy Carhart) is a white supremacist, just like Tom Berenger was in Betrayed. Bernadette and the creep have a baby daughter, like the one Barbara Hershey had in Beaches. Bernadette collects her kid, steals her husband's '59 pink Caddy and takes off for Reno with Clint in hot pursuit, as he is in most Clint Eastwood movies. Before long, Clint and Bernadette are sharing the same car and acting all cute and smoochy, like Burt Reynolds and Sally Field did in Smokey and the Bandit. Clint gets to play goo-goo with an infant, the way Tom Selleck did in Three Men and a Baby, but he stops short of changing a diaper. Like Chevy Chase in Fletch, he is a master of disguise. I liked him best as a lounge lizard with a phony mustache and a gold lamT jacket. Actually, I liked all of his disguises, since they diverted attention from the formula path the movie's director, Buddy Van Horn, seemed hellbent on taking. John Eskow is credited with the, ha-ha, original screenplay.

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(Posted: Dec 8, 2000)