My Fellow Americans (1996)

Directed by Peter Segal. Starring Jack Lemmon, James Garner, Dan Aykroyd, Bradley Whitford, Wilford Brimley, John Heard, Lauren Bacall, Everett McGill, Sela Ward, Marg Helgenberger, Connie Ray, Jack Kehler, James Rebhorn, Esther Rolle. [PG-13]

Lemmon and Garner play squabbling ex-presidents, and all the good will and old-fashioned panache in the world wasn’t going to make this pairing work because it’s pitched as a high-concept Odd Couple-style comedy, butthey’re trapped in an auto-pilot conspiracy thriller plot. With a scandal about to break, the current president (Aykroyd) and his Chief of Staff (Whitford) frame Lemmon, which leads to the assassination of a potential whistle-blower, repeated attempts on both former prez’s lives, the “Grumpy Old Statesmen” going on the lam across the country while being pursued by NSA agents…I mean, why hire these actors to do little more than deliver a string of tired quips and sub-par insults in between incredulous sequences where they’re jumping off a train, barely avoiding getting blown up in a helicopter, and coming about six inches from being impaled by a fiberglass carrot? Fellow old pros Brimley and Bacall are given virtually nothing to do. Peter Tolan co-scripted with story writers E. Jack Kaplan and Richard Chapman. In a minor role, Michael Peña makes his film debut.

33/100