Review of The Lonely Guy (1984) by Chris M — 06 Jan 2009

The word that springs immediately to mind is "cornball," which may sound like a compliment for an early Steve Martin vehicle but, I promise, it isn't in this case. The premise is "The Jerk fights to find love," but with the painful attempts to bring the funny and romance cliche after romance cliche, the filmmakers only touch roughly a third of The Jerk and a sixteenth of love.

Martin, in full dorkiness, relation to the audience be damned, seems to know what a clunker he's in. There are a few scenes we can sense his determination to focus on whichever dead-in-the-water bit he's doing next, but it's probably those terrific rom-com scripts with names like Roxanne and Parenthood he understandably can't take his mind off while paddling through this torture to be in the running for their leading men.

The sucker picked to play the leading lady is Judith Ivey, who isn't much to look at and even more intolerable when her Iris is revealed to be a moron with a lackluster personality who thinks sneezes and orgasms are synonymous.

When that playground giggle is the funniest situation of the film (that is, aside from the laughably awful soundtrack by America), how could you not know you're making a disaster? The Lonely Guy insensibly forms a lampooning lemming-like minority out of men so distraught over their lack of a significant other that they collectively claim one specific always-foggy bridge to end it all; try laughing.

And who better to play the spokesperson for these fledgling Mr. Cellophanes than a bald Charles Grodin? The Lonely Guy may have slightly provided for the launch of a dignified career for Martin, but it's also a speed bump not worth looking back at.

Huge miscalculation.