Directed by: Hugh Wilson
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alfred Molina
The Brendan Fraser George of the Jungle movie that came out a couple years before this did pretty well, so why the fuck wouldn’t they just go ahead and make him be in a movie about another Jay Ward cartoon?! At no point did anybody think about how actually terrible the source material for Dudley Do-Right was, but I guess they didn’t really care.
An evil man named Snidely Whiplash (Molina) runs everybody out of town, then paints gold on a bunch of rocks around the place, creating an artificial gold rush of tourism to the town. Only the single mountie in the area, Dudley Do-Right, has any chance of stopping him, but to do so he must take lessons from Eric Idle in how to be a “bad guy”.
This movie is very, very bad. None of the jokes work, and weirdly enough the film seems to expect that the audience is already pretty deeply familiar with the source material because it doesn’t set up any of the characters at all, and the whole point is that there’s a role reversal between the two leads. What could possibly lead someone to do that? I do feel like I have to mention Alfred Molina as Snidely Whiplash, who is an… unconventional choice for the role, at least. He does okay, I guess, and he kinda gets the voice down, it’s just really weird because now, of course, I think of him as Dr. Octopus. Weird.
Films in Boxes 
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