Review of Clue (1985) by Andy B — 01 Jul 2009

If you're going to make a film out of a board game - although hopefully you just won't, since it's a plainly horrible idea - you could pick worse source material than Cluedo. A plot-driven murder mystery based on entire libraries of books, plays and films, it shouldn't be that hard to transform it back into a non-roleplaying story. In theory. Jonathan Lynn's film mucks it up royally, however, and also fails in his attempt to turn this murder mystery into an entertaining farce.

What's wrong with it fits into two categories: the mystery and the comedy. The mystery stinks because it's slow, laborious and talky. The numerous characters (Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum etc.: in a rare flash of wit, these are revealed to be aliases) all talk and talk about why they've been gathered to a mysterious mansion. We find out details about their sordid lives - although honestly, who cares? - and, once the bodies start mounting up, they quickly realise that pretty much any of them could have Dunnit.

(That's another thing: the moment more than one person dies, it stops being a murder mystery at all, and simply becomes a race to survive being mass-murdered. The characters don't put any real effort into working out who the killer(s) might be, which seems like a fairly integral part of the board game to miss out. Oh, and Victim #1 doesn't even die for half an hour. The time spent waiting for this to happen is a vacuum of dullness. For God's sake, why not start the movie off with a corpse?).

The comedy is a mixture of weak and desperately witless. It's kind of funny that the first victim is called Mr Body, and Tim Curry - far and away the best thing in this - gets a few witty observations as the butler, which seems to be the lot of all fictional butlers. But then there's a dire running gag about dog's mess, some laborious gay innuendo about Mr Green, male characters endlessly panting after the buxom maid, and a lot of sometimes excruciating "witty" dialogue. You might assume that having comic actors like Christopher Lloyd and Michael McKean around would save it, but they tend to be either sleepwalking for a paycheque (Lloyd) or getting lost among the too-numerous cast (McKean). The entire cast, including the normally reliable Madeline Kahn, is wasted.

Things do get funnier towards the end, when the pace finally picks up and the characters actually do a little detective work. Then we get the infamous three endings, which don't add very much (the first and longest ending is clearly the "proper" one), but do at least suggest a sillier, more daringly daft film.

Clue doesn't work well as either of the things it tries to be. It's too boring for a comedy, too mindless for a mystery. That it sucks shouldn't come as a huge surprise, since it's based on a board game. Still, I'd advise you give it a miss. Mystery solved.