To say that Gone Fishin’ is a dumb movie would be an understatement. If they somehow figured out how to watch movies while you’re in a comatose state this would be a movie they would play. Simplistic and without any agenda, it’s just so damn relaxing that I simply had to recommend it. Sometimes this is exactly what you want to watch. Something without intricate plots, complex characters and twists. Just a plain old predictable comedy. To spice things up, consider that the script for this movie wrote none other than J.J. Abrams (Lost, Super 8, Star Trek: Into The Darkness, Star Wars: Episode VII)!
It’s Sunday, you’re trying to get over the hangover from last night and you just want to space out. You play this movie and just go Zen. A feel-good, family time entertainment movies like Gone Fishin’ are a thing of the past now, so it’s also amusing to see how they went about creating such a movie. Especially when you consider the budget of a whopping 53 million freakin’ dollars. You gotta be wondering how the fuck did they manage to spend so much on a movie about two guys going fishing. Granted, there are a lot of stunts and scenes where shit explodes or just crashes. A perfect example of a sturdy nineties action comedy. It’s both an adventure and a road movie with a really good pacing.
Meet Joe and Gus, two average guys who just love fishing. However, it seems that fishing doesn’t love them and they always end up in some trouble when they go fishing. When they win a trip to Florida everglades to do some angling, their wives tell them they have to be back by Thanksgiving. As it turns out this will be a bit hard to pull off as their car gets stolen by a murdering conman. And this is just the beginning of their troubles.
Joe Pesci and Danny Glover were great here, playing this type of comedy pitch-perfect and straight as fuck. We also have Rosanna Arquette and Willie Nelson in supporting roles to spice things up. This movie is so bad that it simply pushed through and came out on the other side as hilarious. Joe and Gus keep calling each other by name in every other sentence. In every fucking other sentence!
You can clearly see that they were trying to ride the wave of boomer buddy comedies like Grumpy Old Men and My Fellow Americans. The sequel to the first one, Grumpier Old Men is also about fishing. This is probably the hardest review I had to write because I don’t know how to describe this movie. You simply have to see it to believe it. By now, you know what it’s like so either check it out or move on to something else.
Director: Christopher Cain
Writers: Jill Mazursky, J.J. Abrams
Cast: Joe Pesci, Danny Glover, Rosanna Arquette, Lynn Whitfield, Willie Nelson, Nick Brimble
Fun Stuff: John G. Avildsen was the film’s original director. He was fired after two weeks, paid his $2 million salary, and replaced by ‘Christopher Cain’
Rating:
IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119214/
