TV Reviews : Unsavory Debut for Candy’s ‘Hostage’

Whether John Candy ever might have gone on to develop a directorial style will never be known. What is known is that “Hostage for a Day”--a TV movie that marked his directing debut, completed before his death--wasn’t a promising start.

It hews closer to the cheap laughs of Candy’s worst movie vehicles than the knowing ones of his great “SCTV” days, despite his having brought several fellow Second City alumni in front of the camera.

The titular “Hostage” here is George Wendt, as a lovable lug who wakes up on his 41st birthday married to a cheating, money-grubbing, shrewish spouse (“Saturday Night Live”/”SCTV” vet Robin Duke) and pathetically indebted to her bullying father (John Vernon). Terminally harried, he gets out his old coonskin cap and flashes back, figuratively and literally, to his bucolic childhood when he dreamed of heading to Alaska.

A chance meeting with his pre-adolescent sweetheart (Christopher Templeton) gives him the impetus to realize that dream. His escape plan: to feign being held hostage by Russian terrorists. The wacky catch: He really does end up a hostage of Russian terrorists. This lowest-common-denominator slapstick doesn’t play out any more cleverly than it sounds.

Passingly, Wendt and his newly rediscovered love manage some sweet moments, and any feature that features a disabled woman as a romantic lead without making a messy plot point out of it deserves a good mention.

But mostly the movie goes for the mustiest, most exaggerated and misogynistic laughs, giving us bumbling law enforcement, dastardly Russians (one of which is a bearded Candy, in a cameo) and gold-digger wives as guffaw fodder. This is two hours of comedy held hostage, best avoided by Candy fans who want to savor their memories.

* “Hostage for a Day” airs at 8 tonight on Fox (Channels 11 and 6).