MOVIE REVIEW : Premise Too Much for ‘Assets’

With a half dozen more rewrites, “Frozen Assets” (citywide) might just have squeaked by. In present form, it’s hopeless, a romantic comedy with a tricky premise that demands the utmost in inspiration to carry it off but instead receives only the most trite, stale development. Too good-natured for its own good and synthetic from start to finish, it serves only to make its stars, Shelley Long and Corbin Bernsen, seem so lightweight that you come away feeling that maybe they really do belong on TV, the medium of their greatest successes, and not on the big screen.

Bernsen plays an L.A.-based perennial junior executive who gets a make-or-break opportunity when he’s sent to Oregon to turn around an unprofitable small-town bank. When he arrives, he figures out that it’s a sperm bank, run by Long. Naturally, the two instantly--laboriously, alas--clash, with the immediately predictable result that they will soon fall head-over-heels in love.

Whereas Long sees the sperm bank as serving a vital community service, Bernsen feels he must go to any extreme to make it profitable. He offers a reward of $100,000 to the man with the highest sperm count as an incentive to help him fill an order for 5,000 vials of sperm.

Although writers Don Klein (who also produced) and Tom Kartozian do a fair enough job in writing decent, though strictly conventional, parts for their stars, they reveal little aptitude for writing jokes. Their best writing is reserved for Larry Miller, who runs away with the picture as Bernsen’s wildly eccentric sidekick. If “Frozen Assets” (rated PG-13 for sex-related elements) accomplishes nothing else, it does showcase Miller’s gifts as a comedian, and it also provides some nice moments for Dody Goodman as Miller’s equally oddball mother. Not helping matters in genereal is the lackluster direction of Australia’s George Miller.