(Jim Goddard, 1986)
We are beyond the halfway mark of the Terrible 19 Movie Marathon and having a blast! Next up, TV's Jim Goddard helms the 1986 mega-bomb featuring then super-couple Madonna and Sean Penn, Shanghai Surprise. The titular "surprise" is an exploding travel belt that blows the gropers off the head baddie during an opium deal in the opening scene (he shows up later with porcelain hands!). But, the real surprise is that Shanghai Surprise has a pretty fun plot, if you can get past the hastily cobbled together scenes, the wooden acting of Madonna, and the utterly unbelievable connection between the two lead characters. For such a high profile couple, they show a surprising lack of chemistry on screen, but beyond that the script doesn't give us any reason to believe in the romance between Glendon and Gloria, and it doesn't help that every other time Madonna speaks you can see the pages of the script being flipped. Shanghai Surprise flops somewhere between Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Elaine May's Ishtar, but unlike those infamous bombs has not developed as large a group of defenders in the intervening years. I'm not ready to start that particular fan page, but it's not difficult to see the action comedy with a nice little twist lurking inside this choppy, dull ode to von Sternberg's Macao with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell (not a great movie to begin with). Throw in a mid-Eighties Indiana Jones cash-in vibe, and you've got Shanghai Surprise.
Jen's Award for Best Dialogue
(After Gloria has fallen drunk through a window into a muddy duck pen)
Gloria Tatlock: "Look how I wind up...with a buncha chickens!'
Glendon Wasey: "They're ducks."
Up Next: We bet it all on Neil.
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