Pesci brightens up comedy in '8 Heads in a Duffel Bag'

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Since this is a comedy, let's first of all grant it the light heart it deserves. We're not looking for depth, just laughs, and on that score 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag delivers aplenty.

You'll get a bonus if you like Joe Pesci, that perpetually unhinged, rumbling volcano who flies off a handle at the drop of a hat.

Running the gauntlet of Martin Scorsese's mobster films has made him America's premier weasel, the best-dressed with the swagger of a low-level wiseguy.

Yet, the Lethal Weapon franchise shows that he too has a talent for slapstick, a special brand of comedy that distills violence and humor into Hollywood's favorite pastime.

In this silly but entertaining movie directed by Tom Schulman (who penned Dead Poets Society), Pesci plays mobster bagman Tommy Spinelli.

He has eight decapitated heads to deliver to the Big Boss in 48 hours, or else his own head will be on the line.

This being a comedy, the bags get switched at the airport and Spinelli's odious delivery ends up with Charlie Pritchett (newcomer Andy Comeau), a naive premed student en route to Mexico to meet his gorgeous girlfriend (Kristy Swanson) and her snooty parents (George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon).

Desperate to get his heads back, Spinelli bursts in on Pritchett's fraternity brothers and tortures them until they give him information as to Charlie's whereabouts.

Despite its ghoulish premise, there is nothing remotely macabre about this movie, that is, unless you consider eight severed heads singing Mr Sandman morbid.

Although Pesci may concoct images of pulverized bodies, grisly shootings, and manic bouts of violence, the parameters of comedy transforms the movie's proceedings into a screaming parody of what he does best.

For one, the mood: redolent of jangly Tom and Jerry tunes, twisty tango and Hawaiian samba, you'd think you're watching the beach edition of Looney Tunes.

Take the torture scenes, unsullied by any subtext other than the knowledge that all parties involved are actually having a lot of fun.

The methods are so ingenuous they seem like new age advertisements for a 1990s "I'm just goofing around" gangster.

At one point, in the mother of all screwball tortures, half- naked Stevie (Todd Louiso) and Ernie (David Spade) are put on their stethoscopes while Spinelli bangs the metal discs together.

Better still is Spinelli, an uncharacteristically low-key outing for Pesci: cool, deadpan, business-like, and not even all that profane.

The scene in which he first boards the plane is uproarious, precisely because we know that restraint is not his strongest suit.

Yet this leavened version of Pesci, in his pared down environs, is precisely what the movie needs.

Other than lifting the movie beyond its cliched plot devices, he makes mincemeat out of his wacky peers through the sheer force of experience.

Comeau somehow makes such a vapid presence out of a straightforward role and is totally undeserving of Kristy Swanson, whose fresh, All-American beauty sends male audiences swooning.

Swanson herself is a window-dressing vision of Guadalupe.

Deeply-tanned Hamilton, who shows no sign of aging, is not on screen enough, even though he's stuck with that ultimate self- debasing name, Dick.

It is delightful to see him on a self-worship spree again, Hollywood's perennial Dapper Dan increasingly stuck with sideshow roles in farcical movies.

Cannon serves only one function, and that is to overact. Even Louiso and Spade, who are already on-the-mark as a bumbling duo, get more mileage out of their teamwork with Pesci.

Louiso is the tortured voice of conscience, who takes leave of his senses after an hour or so of ongoing sadism.

Spade is a closet sadomasochist, jazzing up his trademark cynicism with a kind of vacuous "I'll go along with whatever you say" opportunism.

The screen practically brightens up whenever they appear as the perfect fodder for Pesci's seething Raging Bull.

As slapstick demands, scenes of mayhem at the Mexican guest house spin out one comic catastrophe after another.

Comeau and Hamilton are in a room together, and the former goes ballistic upon discovering the heads. In a priceless counterpoint, Hamilton is engaged in an anti-Oedipal phone conversation with his grizzly bear of a mother (Ernestine Mercer).

A disheveled Comeau bumps into Paco the waiter -- a collection of several "third world" stereotypes, grinningly idiotic, overly friendly to the point of intrusive -- one time too many.

The guest house's pet dog makes a run for the heads once too many.

The heads, created by special-effects guru Greg Cannom (The Mask), get transported around once too many, until they end up on a merry-go-round inside a clothes dryer.

At one point, there are as many as 14 heads involved, with much wrangling over whether chopping the head of a cryogenically- frozen person is considered murder.

Mercer fitting into the Stop! Or my Mom will shoot! mold may not appeal too many (if she were in Demolition Man, she would have received enough swearing ticket to land her in the slammer for life) and for that she is quickly disposed of.

For all the movie's highlights, there is a mother lode of comic potential left unmined.

Things never get truly wicked or mordant, just by-the-book funny, and only a touch distinguishable by its inspired casting.

Heads don't travel in a duffel bag often, so rather than building to a climax, the movie remains episodic.

Halfway through the movie, it rambles so much (snarling Mexican thugs and a coyote are called upon) that it marginalizes even the central characters.

That said, there are enough primal laughs and plot twists here to satisfy even nonbelievers, and Pesci and the two boys wring such a hilariously unsubtle punch to the business of killing that you'd wish mobster movies need never to return to realism.

It is only when Comeau delivers that patronizingly derogatory view of "Third World" countries that we can sense splinters of disappointment in the audience.