Review of The Secret of My Success (1987) by Rainer K — 19 May 2012

They just don't make films like this anymore... (and you could argue that's a good thing).

Today's mainstream audiences are served with more-or-less inventive reimaginations of rom-coms and big CGI-ladden blockbusters. One-man-show comedies with terrible soundtracks but enough cheesy lines to make any soap opera writer jealous don't have find much audience nowadays I guess.

Pity, actually, because despite its shortcomings I had an unexpected good time with (Footloose-) director Herbert Ross' vehicle.

Fox is amiable and plays the naive and goodhearted Brantley Foster with vigor and charisma. He works the cheesy lines and never shows any doubt in the ridiculous plot (it's preposterous to think anyone could believe this...) while constantly changing from slapstick comedy into drama mode. That was definitely not an easy part to play and Fox has also an awful lot of screen time but he pulls it off like only few actors could (I'd like to see a young Tom Cruise in this role though).

As I already mentioned not only the dialogue will hurt your ears but also the soundtrack. Consisting of various pop songs which all sound the same and have 80s written all over them. As I'm not a big fan of the era I just hoped for the next conversation to start so that the music stopped (unfortunately, the talking wasn't much better...).

For a modest Hollywood production that earned quite some dough at the box office, The Secret was incredibly flawed. Not only the writing but also the editing. There were these strange voice-over backflashs recounting what happened just five minutes ago as like the filmmakers tried to conveniently sum up for TV audiences after commercial breaks.

Whatsoever, I liked the film! I don't know why and how he did it but somehow The Secret of My Success worked for me. It's nowhere near an award contender or a personal favourite but I had fun for the 100 minutes it went down - and that's the primary purpose of movies. Hell, I'm dying a little inside but The Secret of My Success is a tomato as fresh as it gets.