Oh, I don't know if the budget for Year of the Comet was actually miniscule, though the craft sure is.
Year of the Comet has been a curiosity for me ever since I read William Goldman's book Which Lie Did I Tell? If you don't recognize that name, Goldman is the celebrated screenwriter -- or was, since he died in 2018 -- who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride and numerous other great titles.
He also wrote Year of the Comet, to his great shame.
As I recall, he doesn't speak ill of any movies whose scripts he wrote except this one. I thought he might have been exaggerating ... but no.
I was paying attention to movies in 1992 when Year of the Comet came out, but I didn't remember it at all when I read the book, despite it starring the then-bankable Penelope Ann Miller and TV star Tim Daly, whose own potential movie career might have been short-circuited by this flop.
But I didn't know how bad it truly was until I stumbled over it last night on Amazon, probably 20 years after I read Goldman's book.
(And it may have only recently become available, as I just noticed this is the second time I have tagged the movie on this blog. The first time was in a 2010 post about movies I couldn't get my hands on no matter how hard I tried. I requested to review Year of the Comet back when I still wrote for AllMovie, but it wasn't available on DVD -- and streaming didn't yet exist.)
The movie is promoted on Amazon as in the vein of Romancing the Stone, and boy is that generous. The adventures of our leads surround trying to get back a stolen bottle of wine that may have belonged to Napoleon and is estimated to be worth more than a million dollars. The bottle is comically large, the size of a fire hydrant, and about as heavy as you would expect a bottle of wine that big to be -- which doesn't prevent Miller's character from swinging it like a club at one point to knock out a bad guy, though why she would ever take such a ridiculous risk with something she valued so highly is beyond me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Daly is a rogue adventurer in the style of Michael Douglas' Jack Colton, to be sure, but he has none of Colton's charm. In one typically classless sample of Goldman's dialogue -- no, this movie didn't just become bad in the hands of director Peter Yates -- he tells Miller's character that the first time he saw her he knew he wanted to sleep with her. Which is a really clueless example of saying the quiet part out loud. Sure that's the subtext of every on-screen relationship between two movie characters who are supposed to have chemistry, but saying it just makes you sound like a creep. Never mind the conditions in which he says it, when he's probably going to kill them both while about to crash a helicopter he doesn't really know how to fly. Apparently, these were what he wanted his famous last words to be.
Not that Daly's hilariously named Oliver Plexico ever truly believes they will die when they crash their helicopter into the side of a shack in the Scottish highlands. (Tell that to Kobe Bryant.) And naturally, when this does happen, it doesn't even cause a scrape on either of its passengers, who effectively laugh it off. Well, he laughs it off, she's horrified, but don't worry, she'll tell him she's in love with him about ten minutes of screen time later, not long after a particularly vulgar and unclever episode of trying to seduce her. Yes, that's the kind of movie this is.
They are alternately pursuing and being pursued by Louis Jourdan, who I always think of as Kamal Khan in Octopussy. But see, Jourdan doesn't actually care about the wine he is tracking. He cares about a piece of paper taped to the side of the bottle that contains a scientific formula for some kind of growth hormone that causes anyone who injects it to become young again. This information is introduced comically late in the movie -- in fact, not until the penultimate scene of this curiously brief 90-minute movie.
After he makes and then injects this, there's this weird scene where he starts to sing, and his vision blurs, and Penelope Ann Miller is singing back to him, as part of some ploy to catch him off guard or something. I really can't explain this any better because it made absolutely no sense, and also because of the cheap wine I was drinking, which means the whole thing could have been a hallucination. The movie thinks it's funny so I can only imagine Goldman, or whoever added this scene, thought it was some sort of oddball tonal detour, the type of thing that might work in a Mel Brooks movie. But this ain't no Mel Brooks movie.
Other terrible things I can remember:
- There's a part where a bad guy is escaping in a rowboat with the bottle of wine, with Daly and Miller following in another rowboat. Yes, this movie features a rowboat chase. But that's not even the terrible part. Instead of sitting, as is customary when you row a boat, the man stands. Not only is it impossible to imagine being able to keep your balance while standing in a rowboat, especially if you are the one working the oars, but I can't see how you would get better thrust on your oar strokes from a standing position than a seated position.
- Helpless woman that she is, Miller's character is being held captive in a tower, Rapunzel-style. Because he can do just about everything, despite being an obnoxious ass, Oliver Plexico attempts to climb up the cobblestone face of the outer wall, even though it is almost entirely lacking in reasonable hand and footholds. Predictably he gets stuck and she has to save him -- he tells her with some amount of irony -- by tying together bedsheets and pulling him up. Accepting for a minute that she might have the strength to do this -- in the spirit of a feminism this movie direly needs, I don't want to suggest she can't -- she ties the bedsheets around her waist as well, meaning all of his dead weight is pulling at her spine. Then again, that's the same super spine that survived the helicopter crash without a scratch, so far be it from me to doubt it.
- Oh, in order to convince her that she should save him, while standing on this small bit of rock that hasn't yet fallen off the outside of the wall, Plexico pledges his undying love for her. Now keep in mind how short this movie is and how recently she hated him because she thought (correctly) he was a sexist pig. Now she tells him "I've been waiting all my life for you, now I'm not going to let you go!" It must be a pretty sad life if you've been waiting all of it to have someone leer at you and tell you they wanted to sleep with you as soon as they laid eyes on you.
- In this spirit, there are multiple wedding proposals in this movie. In fact, Plexico buys time when Jourdan is planning to shoot them both because he tells Jourdan he just wants to propose to her before he dies. Yes this is all as idiotic as it sounds.
- I'm just going to spoil the ending. They recover the bottle of wine and it goes to auction. A bunch of stuffy rich guys are bidding each other up and are on the verge of tapping out when the wine has gotten up to $3.2 million. It's then that Plexico jumps in with a needlessly large bid of $5 million, to gasps around the room. It turns out that not only did he go to MIT (this is revealed casually in the scene where he recognizes the chemical formula of the growth hormone just by its computer diagram), but he also happens to be rich.
- And as a proposal present -- yes it appears they actually are going to marry -- he of course opens the wine. (I mean, she did earlier say she "would give everything in the world for just one sip," in a typical moment of laughable hyperbole.)
This movie is awful, awful, awful.
Oh yeah, the cheap wine I was drinking. It was actually made by a local winery specially as a tie-in with my baseball club. It's called The Perfect Game and it's a 2017 shiraz. I bought six bottles last year to support the club. And no one is going to pay multiple millions for it, like they spent on the wine in Year of the Comet (and on the movie itself), but for a non-connoisseur like me, it's infinitely more satisfying than this movie ever had any chance of being.
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