Movie Review – Dutch

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From the Editor – Dan Stephens has been around the halls of Fernby Films for ages, having previously penned an article or two for earlier Worst Film Weeks, as well as our Matrix Event from a couple of years ago. Dan runs his own UK-based site, Top 10 Films, through which he prints many top 10 lists revolving around film, as well as reviews and news and even competitions! If you’re keen to read more of his work once you’re done here, head on over to Top 10 Films and let him know what you think!!

By the nineties John Hughes was turning his attention away from teenagers, applying his penmanship to stories about kids before they reach the teen years. These included Dennis The Menace, Beethoven, Baby’s Day Out, and Miracle On34th Street. However, it was Home Alone that certainly drew the most praise in his collection of films about kids, but today I’m focusing on the least discussed. Indeed, the worst of the bunch. Yes – even more eye-gougingly painful than Baby’s Day Out!

In 1991 he wrote Dutch, a loose remake of his own Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and replaced the Steve Martin and John Candy roles with Ed O’Neill (of Married With Children/Modern Family fame) and child newcomer Ethan Embry. The comparison’s between the two films are too evident making O’Neill and Embry feel like replacements of the two comedy greats, so you’re constantly thinking they just don’t live up to their counterparts, and unfortunately this is just the first failed hurdle of many that Dutch trips over.

The film tells the tale of ‘nice’, working class guy Dutch who wants to please his new girlfriend (JoBeth Williams) to such a degree he offers to drive across country to pick up her little brat of a kid who refuses to come home from school. As soon as Dutch arrives at the school and meets her son for the first time, things get off to a bad start. Doyle (Ethan Embry) thinks he’s a total stranger so beats the living daylights out of him, before Dutch can eventually restrain the kid and introduce himself. This is just the start of the mishaps to befall this warring pair, as they lose their car, get robbed by hookers, and nearly get themselves killed along the way.

Dutch doesn’t allow for subtlety in its preachy proletariat versus the bourgeois posturing, right down to having the kid meet an African-American Mum struggling to make ends meet and providing that all too familiar ‘you’ve got to believe in hope’ speech. Faiman doesn’t know whether this film is an allegory for fatherhood, and the consequence on the young of rich parents living in a ‘yes’ world, or a straightforward buddy-road comedy between an adult and a kid. It becomes grating how he jumps from moments of slapstick comedy to serious drama, and the changes are all too evident. One moment the kid will be beating the hell out of Dutch, him getting up from another kick in the balls, wincing but being quite jovial about it, and the next he’ll be pushing the kid into the toilet, shouting at him to stop his childish games. One side is happy-go-lucky slapstick humor – no matter how many punches are landed they’ll be no blood; the other is almost difficult to watch as the adult, in an act of sheer bullying, push’s the kid around, putting his foot down and making a stand. In the latter, the laughs are gone; we are thrust into a relationship torn by the child’s inherent hatred of his mother for, in his eyes, breaking up their family by leaving his father, and Dutch who is desperately trying to win the heart of the child so he can make the family work. Is it possible to even contemplate this seriously when moments earlier we were witnessing the kid beat the living daylights out of a man who seemed helpless and yet perfectly happy to fall down with all the Laurel and Hardy faces and physical comedy clichés?

Faiman, admittedly, is not working from one of John Hughes better scripts, but neither seem to know where they want to go with it. Perhaps Hughes’ more delicate touches on the written page were elaborated by Faiman into over-stretched gags that simply don’t work. Watching Dutch set off fireworks as if gleefully having a first time opportunity, taken away from him as a kid, to watch them up-close and personal, just outlasts its place in the film. It seems to take forever getting to the inevitable and that is the film’s biggest downfall. Much like a Planes, Trains And Automobiles remake without two great leading comedic stars, it’s always going to struggle, and the road trip across country is just too predictable for its own good. Some of the supposedly funny moments are taken to their extreme which severely hampers the pace of the film, and yet they at times feel all too awkward because of the juxtaposition of the outwardly slapstick and the familial drama. But it’s the fact, as an audience, we know where the film is going that makes it, through lack of any surprises and the severely hampered underlying themes of fatherhood and friendship, so damn stale.

As a movie for children it offers little amusement by virtue of not having enough physical humor, but as a movie for adults it fails because it has too much. The whole idea of the spoiled rich kid being a product of his environment never materializes properly, but the kid is so selfish and within himself that he becomes too unlikeable and the thought of spending an entire film with his insipid musings is daunting and rather unattractive. The beauty of Planes, Trains and Automobiles was that our two travelers were lovable, if unfortunate, nice guys. When Steve Martin tells John Candy, in a touching scene, that he talks far too much, we don’t dislike Martin because his outburst is the product of his earlier mishaps. When the spoilt little rich kid makes his mother feel like something you find on the bottom of your shoe, or steals Dutch’s car and nearly kills a truck driver, he’s unlikeable because the product of his upbringing is simply everything being handed to him on a plate. His anguish at his parents’ divorce and his mother’s new boyfriend could have easily turned these scenes into heartfelt sentiment, but the sub-plot is lost and we are left with nothing but apathy.

Neither of the two main actors really get to grips with their roles, and perhaps O’Neill is better suited to his old television show Married With Children than the spotlight of film. The problem with the ‘nice’, working class Dutch is that the idea that he ‘worked hard for his money’ as opposed to the kid getting hundred dollar bills for breakfast, is that it comes across heavy-handedly. Him telling Doyle’s rich father that if he hurts his girlfriend, Doyle’s mother, he’ll ‘hit him so hard his dog will bleed’ seems a little excessive, and his whole attitude to Doyle is that of almost training him to be a human-being based on his own understanding. Perhaps this answers exactly why the film flirts between an unusual fine line of slapstick and straight-drama – when the kid bullies Dutch it’s slapstick humor, when Dutch bullies the kid (for example, leaving him on a roadside in the middle of nowhere at night to find his own way to the hotel) it’s child abuse. This, unfortunately, joins Baby’s Day Out as one of the worst films John Hughes has been attached to.

Who wrote this?

Dan Stephens

Dan’s a long-time friend of Fernby Films, and the owner-editor of UK website Top 10 Films. A passionate exponent of films and the film industry, especially within his homeland, Dan can be relied on for fuss-free commentary on cinema as a whole. He remains a valued member of the Fernby Films team.

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