The Secret of My Success (1987)

Directed by Herbert Ross. Starring Michael J. Fox, Helen Slater, Richard Jordan, Margaret Whitton, John Pankow, Christopher Murney, Gerry Bamman, Carol Ann Susi. [PG-13]

Glossy but belabored farce with ambitious young yuppie-in-training Fox arriving in the big city with a finance degree and no luck getting a chance to swim with the corporate sharks, so he “fakes it” in an empty office while dodging his CEO uncle (Jordan) and vamping aunt (Whitton), romancing co-worker Slater. Chock full of shallow high-life fantasies and mistaken-identity comic situations, hardly a minute of it is believable, and director Ross botches one of its key screwball moments by reducing it to snapshot gestures edited like a montage. Zippy commercial entertainment that’s undone by a weak hero (Fox can’t help but be likable, but his character’s motivations are amoral and selfish, and nothing about his performance suggests that he’s a fish-out-of-water Kansas farm kid) as well as a rushed final act that obliterates credibility to get to the pre-programmed happy ending. Aside from the notable usage of Yello’s enjoyably tacky “Oh Yeah,” the score and song cues are consistently grating. Fred Gwynne cameos toward the end; Bruce McGill and Mercedes Ruehl make brief appearances.

47/100