MOVIE REVIEW : Laughter Is on the Lam in Veber’s ‘Three Fugitives’

In “Three Fugitives” (citywide), Nick Nolte and Martin Short make a frequently hilarious odd couple, but the film itself is shamelessly sentimental and often slapdash. Nolte is a convicted bank robber fresh out of prison who’s taken hostage by Short--in a bank robbery!

Nolte’s Lucas, a husky blond professional criminal, a man who keeps his cool even when he’s enraged, contrasts beautifully with Short’s Perry, a slight, desperate amateur in the throes of gun-waving hysteria. This opening sequence in the bank has some of the joyful lunacy of Laurel and Hardy: When a teller tosses a satchel full of money--only $13,000, alas--it lands in a chandelier, provoking new heights of delirium in Perry.

Once Perry and the very reluctant Lucas have made their getaway, however, the film is never again as funny. Early on Lucas clears himself with the police, represented by James Earl Jones, who’s virtually in a permanent state of apoplexy.

The fun starts eroding when we learn that Perry is a struggling widower behind in the rent and unable to continue paying for special schooling for his adorable little daughter Meg (Sarah Rowland Doroff) who hasn’t spoken a word in the two years since her mother died. What’s Perry to do when Meg looks up at Lucas with her big brown eyes and breaks her long silence by saying “Don’t go”? Talk about heart-tugging!

The trouble is that we never learn anything about Lucas beyond the fact that he’s been convicted for armed robbery 14 times--wouldn’t they have thrown away the key long before this?--and that he apparently grew up in an orphanage. How does it happen that Lucas has such a heart of gold behind the gruff Wallace Beery facade? Nolte is an admirably persuasive actor, but if so much is going to be piled on about Perry, we need to know at least a little more about Lucas. As it is, “Three Fugitives” becomes progressively sillier--and less amusing.

There is a lovely turn by the late Kenneth McMillan as a dotty old veterinarian who mistakes humans for animals, and there are many fresh Tacoma, Wash., locales captured luminously by Haskell Wexler.

“Three Fugitives” marks the American directorial debut of France’s prolific and popular comedy specialist, Francis Veber, creator of “La Cage aux Folles.”

Three of them have been made into American movies--”The Toy,” “Buddy, Buddy” and “The Man With One Red Shoe”--and in each instance critics have compared them unfavorably with the originals. Sure enough, “Three Fugitives” was based on “Les Fugitifs” and starred Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard, but Touchstone is taking no chances and not planning to release “Les Fugitifs,” a big hit in France. The irony is that Veber, in remaking his own film, has brought to “Three Fugitives” (rated PG-13 for comic strip violence) the same aura of contrivance and heavy-handedness that marred those other adaptations.