Wrongfully Accused

Directed by Pat Proft, Wrongfully Accused follows Leslie Nielsen’s Ryan Harrison as he’s forced to go on the run after Michael York’s Hibbing Goodhue is found murdered under suspicious circumstances. As one might’ve anticipated, Wrongfully Accused boasts an extremely hit-and-miss sensibility that is, at the outset, allayed by Nielsen’s predictably compelling turn and a smattering of genuinely funny jokes and gags. (There is, in terms of the latter, a genuinely hilarious bit early on involving Harrison and a dog’s rear end.) It’s equally clear, however, that the picture has been saddled with a head-scratchingly convoluted narrative that grows less and less interesting as time unfolds, and, in a far more problematic development, it does become increasingly difficult to work up any real enthusiasm for the central character’s broadly-conceived antics. (The laughs drying up almost completely around the midway mark only exacerbates the uninvolving atmosphere, to be sure.) By the time the prolonged (and incongruously action-packed) closing stretch rolls around, Wrongfully Accused has confirmed its place as a lesser entry within Nielsen’s catalogue of parody films.

** out of ****