Mr. Magoo

Mr. Magoo should be boycotted. Not because it ridicules vision-impaired people, but because it's so unfair to the legacy of the cartoon. Poor Quincy Magoo, and poor Leslie Nielsen. Brilliant in Airplane! and in the Naked Gun movies, Nielsen has since lent his deadpan delivery and blissfully absentminded persona to such slapstick clunkers as Spy Hard and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. But neither of these can compare with the atrocity that is Magoo.

Acclaimed Hong Kong director Stanley Tong (Rumble in the Bronx) gets his fight scenes in (Kelly Lynch is a villain with a mean karate chop), and co-screenwriter Pat Proft (who helped script The Naked Gun) inserts a few pale imitations of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker jokes. But they both forget Magoo. Where the cartoon character naively but gracefully slid through life, the flesh-and-blood Nielsen gets banged up and knocked around like one of the Stooges. Nielsen is best on the rare occasion when he takes charge, quits pretending he's Magoo altogether, and becomes Lieutenant Frank Drebin. There's no reason for the National Federation of the Blind to be upset about Mr. Magoo -- its members should be thankful they can't see this one.

-- Mark Bazer