The Man With One Red Shoe

This is a comedy in which everyone is the straight man.

VR.5's Lori Singer stars as Maddy - a CIA agent charged with extracting information within 48 hours from Richard Drew (Tom Hanks), who is in fact just an innocent violinist.

The fun in this film is that we get to see the enormous tangle of agendas, deceit and misunderstood inferences from everyone's angle. There are a heck of a lot of factions in this, most of them oblivious to what is actually going on, and by the time the closing credits roll, I don't think there's anyone left who hasn't suffered some sort of personal indignity, be it losing their bathroom, losing all their teeth, or losing their sanity. Every character in this is hapless.

I don't normally care much for famous faces, but Lori Singer and Tom Hanks are always such a pleasure to watch, so to see them performing together in such a well-crafted tale as this one is a joy.



Even the diffident Brown (Edward Herrmann) and his domineering superior Ross (Charles Durning) remind me of the diffident Goldstein and his domineering boss on the ASB adverts, making their string-pulling scenes easy to lock-into.

The morals are a bit shaky (Hanks plays a man who's been having an affair with his best mate's wife, which automatically subtracts sympathy from his character, and his relationship with Maddy is automatically less-appealing once they've slept together) but otherwise, this is a classic comedy.

Maddy: "Are you OK? You seem tense."
Richard: "Oh, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not tense. Well, I did pass out today... and got hit in the head by a baseball... and brushed my teeth with shampoo... then butchered Rimsky-Korsakov in front of 1,500 people, and my clothes fell apart. But I'm not *tense*."