Ishtar

Directed by Elaine May, Ishtar follows struggling songwriters Chuck Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) and Lyle Rogers (Warren Beatty) as they agree to a booking in Morocco – where they find themselves caught in the middle of a violent uprising. There’s ultimately little doubt that Ishtar fares best in its early, New York City-set scenes, as filmmaker May, armed with her own screenplay, initially delivers a briskly-paced and legitimately funny endeavor that benefits from its strong central performances – with Hoffman and Beatty’s engaging, charismatic work going a long way towards establishing an irresistibly lighthearted atmosphere. (Beatty, cast as a clueless idiot, is especially entertaining here.) It’s clear, then, that Ishtar‘s slow-but-steady descent into complete tedium is triggered by a progressively tiresome midsection focused on the protagonists’ far-from-enthralling spy shenanigans, and while the narrative has been peppered with a small handful of amusing sequences (eg Chuck attempts to pass himself off as a local), the picture builds towards a hopelessly underwhelming (and entirely ineffective) climax that ensures it concludes on as negative a note as one could envision – which ultimately does cement the film’s place as a thoroughly misguided disaster that squanders Hoffman and Beatty’s stirring efforts.

*1/2 out of ****