The 1987 movie Martin Short will always be proudest of: “Everyone thought it had potential”
There aren’t many stars in Hollywood, or anywhere else, for that matter, who can be called universally beloved, or at least something approximating it. That said, Martin Short ticks many of the boxes, but the actor and comedian nonetheless has his detractors.
Over the course of his career, some people have found that his acting performances and stand-up routines verge too far into grating territory, with his boundless energy and manic mugging not always going down too well, although it’s worth pointing out that those folks are firmly in the minority.
Generally speaking, people fucking love Martin Short, especially other comedians and comedic actors. He’s been cited as an influence by Mike Myers, Ben Stiller, and Bill Hader, among others, and it can’t be a coincidence that they also followed the pipeline from Saturday Night Live to silver screen success.
He’s been a fixture of cinema for over 40 years, too, appearing in an eclectic array of titles, ranging from rewatchable favourites like Three Amigos, Father of the Bride, and Mars Attacks!, to more curious and altogether terrible outings in films like Jungle 2 Jungle, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, randomly, and Clifford, even if Nicolas Cage will defend that awful, awful movie to the death.
However, Short remains prouder of one than all the others, which he prefaced by suggesting that one of his most popular pictures isn’t that great. “I wasn’t that disturbed about the failure of Three Amigos,” he shared. “Because it was not necessarily a great movie.” It wasn’t a flop, but neither was it a runaway hit, and the same can be said of the film he made immediately afterwards.
“With Innerspace, it was a different story,” he continued. “Everyone thought it had the potential to be a big hit. I was talking all the time with [Dennis] Quaid, who was in The Right Stuff, which people thought was going to be the greatest hit of all time, and when it didn’t do so well at the box office, he was crushed.”
In Joe Dante’s sci-fi comedy, Quaid plays an officer who gets shrunk down to miniature size and injected into the body of Short’s supermarket worker and hypochondriac to stop the technology from falling into enemy hands. Naturally, comedic hijinks ensue, and the latter remains immensely fond of his work.
“I felt good about it,” he acknowledged. “I saw it, and I felt it was a good movie, and I did a good job, and all the rest is just a bonus. It’s nice to be in a movie good enough so that, if it comes up in a conversation, you don’t have to jump in and say something so your friends won’t feel they have to talk about it.”
Innerspace won strong reviews from critics and earned close to $100 million at the box office, so it’s not as if it’s an unsung, overlooked, or unfairly maligned hidden gem. It’s one of his most popular flicks by any conceivable metrics, but that doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to celebrate it as one of the smartest big-screen decisions he ever made, and his proudest two hours at the multiplex.
