If you give up that right you may talk, sing, dance, impersonate Elvis or anything else you like. Blue (pretending to arrest a bad guy informant): FBI! You’re under arrest.A semi-frequent trope in spy/cop comedies is a “creative” reading of someone’s Miranda rights. The movie was originally titled “Cloak and Diapers.” I actually think that gives a more accurate impression of the movie, and I wish they’d stuck with it. It’s the second movie for both Dennis Quaid ( Innerspace) and Kathleen Turner ( Romancing the Stone), that I’ve done, and the second spy movie ( Remo Williams). There’s a lot of seconds about this review. Rewatch: Realistically C+, but it’s more of a B-/B to me personally, even now But I still have a lot of nostalgia for it, and there’s worse ways to waste 90 minutes on the weekend. So is it a great movie? No, no it is not. Most of the actual solving of the mystery of where the bad guys are holding the explosive is done in the background, with the actual plan only being described to the audience after the fact. For example, Jeff Blue foils a bank robbery by knocking out and replacing the getaway driver, after having tied a chain to the van’s axle. To say he’s “good” in the role would be stretching things, but he’s definitely one of the most memorable things about the movie, and a couple of his quotes have become running gags around my family.Īnd the award for worst accent on this blog so far goes to…Īs for the actual plot of the movie? Really, what plot? It’s mostly a series of low-key set pieces that follow the same patter: the Blues head to a famous tourist location in New Orleans, get accosted by the cops following them/the bad guys/Muerte (or all three), and get out of it by doing something ridiculous. Tucci has long been one of my favorite character actors, and that love really begins here. This wasn’t my first exposure to Tucci (that would have been Beethoven, though I don’t actually remember him from that movie at all), but it’s the first one to really stick in my memory.Ī lot of the camp in Undercover Blues comes courtesy of his “Muerte”, who seems to exist solely to get beat up, tied up, dropped overboard, thrown out windows, and tossed into alligator pits, all accompanied by high-pitched shrieks.

He plays an ineffectual mugger that gets beaten up by Jeff Blue early in the film, who then spends the rest of the movie bumbling through one revenge attempt after another. I like pretty much every performance in the film, even though many of them have questionable accent choices, but special mention has to go to Stanley Tucci. It was never going to win any awards, but I don’t understand some of the vitriol aimed at it from reviewers (one of which even suggested to buy tickets and give them to all of your enemies. It’s an easy, watchable, low-stress movie, perfect for putting on in the background on a lazy Saturday (or, in my case with this rewatch, while attempting to calm down from a quarantine-related anxiety attack). The Blues always seem to be one step ahead of everyone, including the villains, and are clearly having a blast while running circles around their opponents. The movie never really takes itself too seriously, and is often deliberately campy. It think it has to do with how light and breezy it is.

It also marked the end of Kathleen Turner’s run as a box office lead actress, as she’d be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis shortly after filming it and would swiftly step back to only supporting roles and voice work. It got horrible reviews and sank like a stone at the box office, only making $12 million on a budget of twice that. This movie came and went pretty quickly in 1993. Haven’t seen it since I rewatched it right after getting home from that trip, however. But I’d seen it enough times that when I visited New Orleans for the first time in 2013 I was able to walk around the French Quarter picking out places that they’d used as shooting locations. It didn’t come out until I was 11, so it had to have been some time during middle or high school. I can’t recall the first time that I saw this movie. They have to juggle their mission as secret agents with caring for their baby and dodging the attentions of both the New Orleans police and a small-time mugger with a vendetta against them. Two married government agents, Jeff and Jane Blue, who are on maternity leave in New Orleans, are persuaded into helping recover a stolen shipment of powerful plastic explosives. Starring Kathleen Turner, Dennis Quaid, Fiona Shaw and Stanley Tucci

Kathleen turner undercover blues