Crazy People

Directed by Tony Bill and written by Mitch Markowitz, there are far worse comedies than Crazy People out there on the market and Dudley Moore's adverts are, at times, pretty darn hilarious. Read full review

This leads to some fairly amusing gags involving surreal ads for actual products (e.g., for Jaguar: “Sleek and smart. For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know”). Moore's boss is so horrified by this development that he sends him to a sanitarium, at which point the movie takes an abrupt nosedive into the sort of tacky media lies it is supposedly attacking. Read full review

Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]

Crazy People is one of those sky-high-concept titles, you know? A film with that title had better deliver, had better be stone crazy, wacky to the bone, nuts. With a title that blunt, you don't want to wind up with warmed-over farce of the sort that used to cast Dudley Moore opposite a tall, blond beauty....Uh-oh. [11 Apr 1990, p.D1]

For the first 20 minutes or so, Crazy People is lightweight but fun. Then the movie defies its own logic and falls apart. [11 Apr 1990, p.E1]

The romance falls dismally flat - Hannah and Moore often appear in the same frame, but there's nothing going on between them. [12 Apr 1990, p.F6]

CRAZY PEOPLE is a one-joke movie. It's a pretty good joke: Slightly unbalanced people write ads that tell the absolute truth about products, and the products sell like crazy. But it isn't good enough to make us care for long about a mental-institution romance between Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah that has the feel of ''David and Lisa: The Sit-Com.'' [13 Apr 1990, p.3F]

There is nothing really wrong with the scenes in the institution, except that they're in the wrong movie. Read full review

The satiric idea behind Crazy People deserves a better movie. Read full review

The ads in this film are so funny that I wish I could report that the production containing them is equally hilarious. But as it turns out, Crazy People is wobbly - a watchable but unremarkable showcase for the exceptional ads. Read full review

As for the performances, Moore doesn't bring anything special to his role, but Hannah's slightly awkward and befuddled demeanor works to her advantage, since she's playing someone with a tenuous grip on reality. The other performers are generally left adrift by the simpleminded, juvenile script, which, devoid of comic inspiration, resorts to gratuitous profanity and crude sex jokes. Read full review