Life Stinks (1991)

Directed by Mel Brooks. Starring Mel Brooks, Lesley Ann Warren, Jeffrey Tambor, Theodore Wilson, Howard Morris, Rudy De Luca, Stuart Pankin, Michael Ensign, Matthew Faison, Raymond O’Connor, Brian Thompson, Robert Ridgely, Billy Barty. [PG-13]

A rare non-spoof for the filmmaker/actor, Brooks taps into his inner-Preston Sturges for this warmhearted “message comedy”. He plays a billionaire looking to buy up a slum district and turn it into a state-of-the-art paradise for the rich, so he makes a wager with a rival that he can survive for thirty days as a penniless bum on those mean streets, and to the victor goes the real estate spoils. Brooks’ broad vaudevillian style isn’t well-suited for the heart-tugging episodes (earnestness still feels like schtick in his hands), and the comic portions have rhythms that aren’t in sync with the real world as presented. The hero is a caricature—we don’t get to know his personality or background with any depth at all before his world turns upside down, and broad skid-row clichés play out as episodic sketches and blackout gags which sometimes earn chuckles, but rarely real laughs. A fantasy-tinged dance sequence set to Cole Porter and a burlesque-style argument with De Luca’s deluded “industrialist” play most memorably; the rest is too mild and underdeveloped for the dire subject Mel probably would’ve been better off straight-up lampooning instead.

48/100