Central Intelligence, the only nonanimated and nongenre hit of the summer, is far from the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Among other things, it has a startlingly effective low-key performance by Kevin Hart, who for the first time in his film career doesn’t spend two hours chomping on the scenery and jumping up and down like a human pogo stick. But it’s one of those pictures that’s a comedy only because it isn’t a drama. Which is to say, it doesn’t have a lot of jokes and it doesn’t really have any funny lines. It just has Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson acting silly as they go through the paces of a plot about two high-school acquaintances meeting 20 years later.
Hart’s character was the big man on campus but has ended up a disappointed accountant. Johnson’s character was a grotesquely obese tormented kid who has spent the subsequent decades working out six hours a day and become a superhero CIA agent. Johnson has never ceased idolizing Hart for an act of kindness toward him, and is more than a little crazy, and Hart finds himself caught in Johnson’s undertow as a spy plot unfolds on the night before their twentieth high-school reunion.
If this sounds familiar, then you are very blessed—because it means you are aware of the existence of one of the funniest movies ever made. Central Intelligence is an uncredited remake of The In-Laws, which starred Alan Arkin and Peter Falk and was released in 1979. It offers an example of how to mine a great movie while taking no inspiration from the signal qualities that actually made it great. As devised by the screenwriter Andrew Bergman, the plot of The In-Laws—an ordinary guy finds himself inadvertently caught up in a gigantic conspiracy—is not much more than a clever update of the Alfred Hitchcock films The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest. It’s a decent plot, and it’s well organized, but it’s what Bergman hangs off this clothesline that makes The In-Laws sidesplittingly, screamingly funny no matter how many times you watch it (and I’ve lost count over the past 37 years).
When Arkin and Falk meet for the first time on the eve of their children’s marriage, Arkin discovers that Falk is nuts. There is an identical scene in Central Intelligence set at a bar in which Hart discovers that Johnson is nuts. But that’s because Johnson acts nuts and looks nuts. In The In-Laws, Falk simply begins telling stories about his travels in a placid raconteur’s voice. He tells Arkin about having been “in the bush” and having seen tsetse flies the size of eagles carry away native babies in their beaks. He says the government can do nothing about the flies because there’s “enormous red tape in the bush” and the flies are protected by the provisions of the Guacamole Act of 1917. He says he had photos but he lost them when he took his jacket to be Martinized.
That‘s how you make a great movie of any sort. You take a plot and break it into scenes and you color those scenes with memorable detail. A great comedy doesn’t just have its characters act silly; it has the silliness emerge from the comic characters like lava from a volcano, and then shows the ordinary characters scrambling to save themselves from the flow.
There are so many great bits in The In-Laws that it’s hard to isolate any one of them. The point is that they are bits, memorable pieces of individual comic business that fit within the whole. The most famous is probably Falk counseling Arkin on how to run across a runway in a Central American country when he’s being shot at: “Serpentine, Sheldon, serpentine!” At which command Arkin runs back to his starting point and commences weaving his way across the runway again.
Every scene is taken to its own logical extension and beyond—as when Arkin is forced to evade cops by driving into the nearest garage. It turns out to be a car-painting business and he emerges with his BMW covered in red and yellow flames.
Central Intelligence has the skeleton but not the flesh, and apparently the skeleton is good enough to earn $100 million or more at the box office. There was an actual remake of The In-Laws a dozen years ago with Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks that was unwatchably awful; but at least in that case Bergman got paid when his work was desecrated. Since his name appears nowhere in the credits for Central Intelligence—the screenplay is by director Rawson Marshall Thurber, Ike Barinholtz, and David Stassen—I think Bergman has a very plausible plagiarism claim on his hands here.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
