One Crazy Summer

Written and directed by Savage Steve Holland, One Crazy Summer follows John Cusack’s Hoops McCann as he heads to Nantucket to spend the summer hanging with his friends and working on his college application – with complications ensuing as Hoops finds himself falling for an aspiring musician (Demi Moore’s Cassandra) fighting to save her grandfather’s house from greedy developers. It’s a fairly standard premise that Holland employs as a springboard for an episodic and surprisingly surreal comedy that’s just about as hit-and-miss as one could envision, as One Crazy Summer boasts (or suffers from) an ongoing emphasis on comedic set-pieces of a decidedly (and aggressively) off-the-wall nature – with, ultimately, very few such moments able to pack the gut-busting punch for which Holland is clearly aiming. (A sequence in which Bobcat Goldthwait’s loony Egg Stork is trapped in a Godzilla costume is a rare bit of laugh-out-loud-funny silliness.) There’s little doubt, then, that One Crazy Summer‘s tolerable atmosphere is due almost entirely to the charming efforts of its oddball cast, as Cusack and Moore’s typically engaging work is matched by a roster of periphery players that includes, among others, Curtis Armstrong, Joel Murray, and Mark Metcalf. The final result is an erratic endeavor that eventually manages to establish itself as an agreeable (if entirely forgettable) piece of work, which is no small feat, certainly, given just how off-putting and underwhelming the picture is in its early stages.

**1/2 out of ****