Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid

Directed by Carl Reiner, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid follows a private investigator (Steve Martin’s Rigby Reardon) as he gets mixed up with a potential femme fatale named Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward). Reiner, armed with a script written alongside Martin and George Gipe, delivers a predominantly tedious (and frequently interminable) misfire that features, at its core, a silly, distracting gimmick, as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid augments its lackluster narrative with clips from other, better movies – with Martin’s one-note character, as a result, interacting with such familiar stars as Kirk Douglas, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Bette Davis. It’s a potentially fun device that wears out its welcome almost immediately, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the picture’s less-than-compelling atmosphere is heightened by its lackluster mystery and recurring emphasis on eye-rollingly unfunny jokes and gags – which, despite a typically game Martin performance, eventually (and inevitably) cements Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid‘s place as a misbegotten experiment that could only have worked as a five-minute SNL sketch.

* out of ****