Movie Log: Quick Change

It's a minor and mostly-forgotten comedy, and The Wife didn't like it at all, but I mostly enjoyed Quick Change. It's from Bill Murray's wandering-in-the-wilderness years, a caper movie set in 1990 New York (which was the city at its nadir, or at least one of its recent nadirs).

Gena Davis is gorgeous and solid (though not given very much to work with, as the Doubting Girlfriend), Murray is funny and not too slickly obnoxious, and Randy Quaid is the obligatory Bumbling, Cowardly Buddy.

The plot starts off with the heist (a bank robbery with Murray in a clown suit), but then meanders off, as our heroes try to get out of the city ahead of the pursuing cops (led by Jason Robards). This movie is very much a collection of loosely connected scenes, filled with a lot of actors you'll recognize -- if you like that sort of thing (and the lack of a serious plot doesn't bother you), you'll probably enjoy this. If you've lived in New York, or knew it pretty well in the late '80s-early '90s, that will definitely help; this is very much a movie of its time and place.

As I said, I liked it (not as much as I might have, if I'd seen it with other people who also liked it), but The Wife definitely did not. I don't think that's a male/female thing; she likes more plot in her movies and has never liked "the city" all that much. But I don't expect everyone will like this, and the people who'll love it probably are the ones who saw it in 1990 and have been talking about it ever since. (There's a few of them on the IMDB boards.)