The Honeymooners (0/10)

by Tony Medley

In the sixth game of the 1934 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cardinals’ Hall of Fame pitcher, 30-game winning Dizzy Dean found himself on first base as a pinch runner. On a ground ball hit to second, Dean tried to break up the double play by going into second standing up. The throw from the shortstop hit Dean square in the head and Ol’ Diz went down in a heap, carried off the field unconscious. The headlines in the Detroit papers the next day screamed, “X-Rays of Dean’s head show nothing.” That was pretty funny. It was funny 10 years later. It was still funny 20 years later. But after 71 years it has lost its cachet.

The first joke in “The Honeymooners” is based on this line which surely has become hackneyed and no longer funny. That that line turns out to be the best line in the movie shows how vacuous all the screenwriters who got Writers Guild credit, names like Danny Jacobson and David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein and Don Rhymer, are. When you see four names getting credit for the script, you know this is a troubled project. Maybe this was a punishment, like, “Do this or we’ll give you a credit on ‘The Honeymooners’.”

But what can you expect from Sherry Lansing’s legacy at Paramount? She tried to remake “Alfie.” Disaster. “The Longest Yard,” which she remade is a lousy movie but it’s getting fairly good box office. Now, with this, she has finally reached the bottom of the barrel in her retirement. This is one of the worst movies ever made. The script is an insult to the audience. Just as an example, Ralph (Cedric the Entertainer) is in a hurry to get to a coffee shop by a certain time to stop a real estate deal. We don’t know what time it is but he gets on a bus and there’s gridlock and he has to move. So what does he do? He goes and finds a phony uniform somewhere, puts it on, somehow, against all odds, immediately finds his buddy, sewer worker Norton (Phil Epps) breaking in a new crew, listens to his speech, then reveals himself, has a rejuvenating reconciliation with Norton, and they go merrily to the coffee shop through the sewer. That would take hours in real life. But this is Paramount and Ralph gets there just in time.

What kind of intellect does it take to entitle this debacle after a revered sitcom and name the characters after characters apparently beloved by many, played by Jackie Gleason (Ralph) and Art Carney (Norton)? With those characters the actors are going to necessarily be compared with the originals. Talk about disaster!

If there was brilliance to “The Honeymooners” of the ‘50s it was that the stories were limited to the relationships among Ralph, his wife, Alice, and Norton. We rarely saw them interfacing with third parties. Most of Ralph’s schemes were in his head and only in our mind’s eye. He talked about them with Norton and Alice and they reacted to him. It was all about imagination and writing and acting.

This “Honeymooners” is nothing like that. There is nothing left to the imagination. We see Ralph carrying out his schemes. The writing is abysmal and the acting is on the same level. Cedric’s Ralph is nothing like Gleason’s. Epps is so inept as Norton that his performance should go down as one of the worst in movie history. It’s not funny. It’s not anything but atrocious.

This would have been dreadful had it had no connection with “The Honeymooners” of the 1950s. By tying it into a classic TV sitcom, it made it just that much worse.

I’ve seen lots of horrible movies this year. I can’t imagine them getting any worse than this.

June 7, 2005