Movie Review: Dudley Do-Right (1999)

The movie stars Brendan Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alfred Molina, Eric Idle, Alex Rocco and Robert Prosky.

The family decided to sleep in Saturday morning and, since I was the only one up, I ended up looking for a movie to watch. There weren’t that many options on our movie channels so, after some consideration, I started watching this particular film for the first time in a long time. Unfortunately, I just didn’t like this choice.

I’ll start out by saying Brendan Fraser was an excellent choice for the title character and did the cartoon hero justice. He was able to perform the action scenes when needed and the witty personality I’ve seen in plenty of other films worked well in this movie too.

Along those same lines, I thought Molina did a decent-enough job as the villain, Whiplash. It was a tough role that not many actors could pull off, especially since he had to honor the cartoon version in a live-action version of the story. But, he did pretty well considering the difficulty of his character.

My problem with this movie is the script never really takes advantage of these talents. The storyline, at best, is a bit choppy and the movie never really manages to get into an easy-to-watch flow.  Plus, even with the great efforts by Fraser and Molina, it honestly was hard to believe they really were the famous hero and villain. It seemed like they were just playing dress up and pretending.

I also wasn’t overly crazy about the ending. Cartoonish violence works great in cartoons. But, it doesn’t translate well to live action and, because of that, watching Dudley charging down a pair of tanks and forcing them to take each other out just wasn’t as entertaining as I think the writers intended it to be, especially with that really weak General MacArthur parody.

Brendan Fraser has had his share of bad movies and, unfortunately, this is one of them. I ended up watching it Saturday morning but it’s not a movie I would take the time to watch again.

My Grade: D