MR. MAGOO

It's the filmmakers who seem blind. They don't even do a good job of making Leslie Nielsen look like Mr. Magoo, the destructively nearsighted millionaire fogy. Sporting a choppy white fringe (the '60s cartoon character, who is reprised in the opening and closing credits, was bald), Nielsen, who brought passive-aggressive bumbling to a high art in the Naked Gun pictures, here suggests an escaped lunatic making up shtick as he goes along. It's no surprise that the plot, which wobbles vaguely around a stolen gem, a Brazilian mobster, and an ugly-adorable dog, is goofy dullsville, but the slapstick tomfoolery turns out to be even worse. It was a disastrous decision to recruit director Stanley Tong, a veteran of Jackie Chan actioners, to create kiddified Rube Goldberg routines. He stages visual gags as if the camera were being operated by a forklift and the stuntmen had forgotten to show up.

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