When Steven Spielberg made his impassioned speech about the power of the scripted word at last year`s Oscar ceremony, John Lafia wasn`t listening. Lafia is the young director and screenwriter of ”The Blue Iguana,” a western thriller comedy that starts out looking like a raw but promising parody of gangster and cowboy films of yore.
Its opening shots show the artifacts of a down-and-out detective hero-booze, pills, cigarette lighter, IRS audit-who is hoping to score one more bust before he`s evicted from his fleabag hotel. It`s a funny, telling 30 seconds capped by the detective`s descent from the room in an ancient ironwork elevator and a shot of his feet stepping out into a puddle.
We don`t see the body attached to those feet until several frames later, when he tries to corral an escaped felon and winds up on the wrong side of a pair of kinky IRS agents. They promise him a deal: They`ll drop all charges if he`ll head for Diablo, a remote, south-of-the-border tax haven where the local industry is money laundering and the local sport is cold-blooded murder.
By now, however, director Lafia is running into a bigger problem than his hero will face in all the punching, plotting, shooting, double-crossing, dynamiting and car chasing that make up the action of ”The Blue Iguana.”
Lafia the director has to contend with Lafia the scriptwriter and, as Spielberg could have told him, it`s no match at all. He has made his movie look like Dada and sound like dodo.
He can shoot a car chase of `50s` Oldsmobiles and De Sotos roaring over chickens on dirt streets. He can hire a Harrison Ford lookalike (Dylan McDermott) and ask him to make like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper. He can get Dean Stockwell to play another weirdo. And he can bathe all the interiors in blue light so they have the ambiance of old black-and-white gangster films. But he can`t mask strategically placed expletives trying to pass for wit, or dialogue that just lies there and whimpers, as in, ”Nobody knows this town like I do. I`ve had my eye on that vault for a long time.”
Only one character, a beatnik barmaid, comes up with lines fey enough to match the intended tone of the film, and one suspects these were ad-libbed by the actress, a veteran of an L.A. improv group.
Part of the problem may be that Lafia, responding to the eclecticism of the `80s, is simply trying to cross-pollinate too many genres. Add to that a clever but completely superfluous opening credit sequence of animated skulls and guns put to a rap soundtrack (”Blue Iguana`s” producers came up via music videos) and you wind up with clutter rather than comedy.
”THE BLUE IGUANA”
(STAR)
Directed and written by John Lafia; photographed by Rodolfo Sanchez; edited by Scott Chestnut; production designed by Cynthia Sowder; music by Ethan James;
produced by Steven Golin and Sigurjon Sighvatsson. A Paramount release; opens April 22 at Chestnut Station, Nortown and outlying theaters. Running time:
1:30. MPAA rating: R. Rough language and violence.
THE CAST
Vince Holloway………………….Dylan McDermott
Cora……………………………Jessica Harper
Reno………………………………James Russo
Dakota…………………………..Pamela Gidley
Yano……………………………….Yano Anaya
Floyd……………………………………Flea
Zoe the barmaid…………………..Michele Seipp
Vera Quinn………………………Tovah Feldshuh
Carl Strick………………………ean Stockwell
