Subject: REVIEW: MULTIPLICITY (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Michael Redman)
Date: 30 Jul 1996 12:58:22 GMT

REVIEW: MULTIPLICITY
                       A film review by Michael Redman
                        Copyright 1996 Michael Redman

** (out of ****)

Mr. Mom has a lot on his hands nowadays and can't get to half of it.
His job requires more hours than are in the day and he just got
assigned even more responsibilities. His wife wants him to spend more
time at home and, by the way, could he finish building their
half-completed home? He misses his kids' sporting events and Brownie
graduation.

Sound familiar? Lack of time must be the disease of the nineties. No
one has the schedule to do it all.  Few have the ability to squeeze in
even the essentials, much less have any fun. When Doug Kinney (Michael
Keaton) is asked what he does to relax, he replies "golf". Questioned
about how often he plays, his response is "never". Welcome to the late
20th century, Doug, where all of our obligations and labor-saving
devices have conspired to steadily shrink the time where we do what we
really want to a scant few hours a week.

Doug can't deal and finds his magical way out one day while supervising
construction at a lab. It turns out that the facility specializes in
creating fully grown clones, so Doug takes home another Doug to help
him out. Doug Number Two is sent to work so that the original can get
his duties done at home.

But, even with two of them, there's still not enough time for golf and
Doug Number Three comes into the picture. Later, Two and Three still
can't get it all done so they duplicate Number Four from one of the
clones. As often happens, the copy of a copy isn't quite as sharp as
the original. No matter how many Dougs there are, the work load
increases to more than can be done.

The film wanders around during the first hour trying to set the stage
for the "message" before it finds its course. Only after the clones
exist is there much humor and the yucks are still fewer than you would
hope. The comedy is mostly various send-ups of the "Two dates in the
same night" scene you're well acquainted with. The only hilarious
scenes are with Number Four, but even then you stand the chance of
feeling guilty at laughing at a "special" (Uh oh, that's not the
correct _euphemism_d'_jour_, is it?) person.

Director Harold Ramis ("Ghostbusters", "Groundhog Day") has a feel for
the science fiction comedy and humorous bits, but these scenes (as well 
as "Groundhog Day") don't hold together as a whole.

He does successfully avoid one apparent pitfall in having four exact
copies of Doug. Instead of copies, which would become annoyingly
redundant, they are aspects of Doug, not actual clones. Number Two is
Manly Man Doug; Three, Feminine Side Doug and Four, Inner Child Doug.
This gives Keaton something to work with and he does so with competence
although nothing spectacular.

Andie MacDowell plays Laura, Doug's long-suffering (and never lets him
forget it) wife. The actress is mostly wasted as more a plot object for
the various Dougs to interact with than an actual human being.
MacDowell does nothing much for the film other than look as if she is
about to cry during every minute she's on screen.

Oh yeah, the message? If you want your woman to really love you, build
her a house.

[This originally appeared in "The Bloomington Voice", Bloomington,
Indiana, 7/26/96. Michael Redman can be reached at [email-masked]]