Once Upon a Crime…

Directed by Eugene Levy, Once Upon a Crime… details the chaos that unfolds after a disparate group of characters, including John Candy’s Augie, Sean Young’s Phoebe, and James Belushi’s Neil, find themselves caught up in a murder mystery. Filmmaker Levy, armed with a screenplay by Charles Shyer, Nancy Meyers, and Steve Kluger, delivers a mostly uninvolving comedy that squanders the efforts of its impressively talented roster of performers, as the movie suffers from an increasingly frenetic atmosphere that grows more and more grating as time progresses – with the heavy emphasis on the far-from-enthralling central case playing an instrumental role in triggering the movie’s downfall (ie it’s just not interesting, generally speaking). And although Levy has peppered the proceedings with some admittedly compelling sequences, including a funny bit involving a hysterical Augie and Neil, Once Upon a Crime… builds towards a sluggish and progressively tedious second half that ensures it concludes on just about as anticlimactic a note as one could’ve envisioned – with the end result a distressing misfire that evaporates from one’s mind seconds after its credits have rolled.

** out of ****