The Tom Hanks movie Roger Ebert detested: “Ripoff”
During the 1990s, Tom Hanks appeared in a series of commercially and critically successful films that cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors. His popularity with audiences was consistently high, and his performances during this period drew widespread acclaim. Among those recognising his work was Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, whose reviews of Hanks’ major roles from that decade reflect a strong appreciation for the actor’s development and screen presence.
This wasn’t always the case, though, as Ebert’s opinion of Hanks’ early films was as far away from his run of four-star ’90s masterpieces as can be. This may be because, in his younger days, Hanks was very much a comedy star, with only one of his works during the 1980s being outside that genre. Even when he made something with dramatic elements, it was balanced out with laughs, but by and large, his output was firmly intended to make audiences roll in the aisles.
Unfortunately for Ebert, while several of these mirth-makers were welcomed with open arms by critics, he was a tougher audience. Astonishingly, Ebert didn’t even like Splash, Hanks’ beloved 1984 breakthrough, and he was even less enthused about a remake of a French film that Hanks made the following year. In fact, his opinion on this flop was so withering that he called into question whether it could even qualify as a comedy.
The Man with One Red Shoe is a comedy in which Hanks plays a concert violinist who becomes an unwitting target of CIA surveillance. The twist is that he’s chosen at random as part of a ploy between two rival factions within the agency – one side picks an ordinary civilian to mislead the other into thinking he’s a person of interest. As the surveillance escalates, Hanks’ character unknowingly becomes entangled in the chaos and ultimately falls for one of the agents assigned to watch him.
Only, according to Ebert, these hijinks barely qualified as comedy in the original French film The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, and they’re even less amusing this time around. He railed against the script, which consistently forced characters into situations where they made the stupidest choices possible, all in the name of advancing the plot. Why? “For the simple reason that if any character in this movie had an IQ higher than his age,” Ebert noted, “the plot would be figured out and the movie would be over.”
By the time he got to the end of his review, and stopped pointing out all the logical inconsistencies in The Man With One Red Shoe, Ebert had a revelation. It struck him that these silly contrivances and familiar movie tropes wouldn’t have bothered him a bit if the movie had accomplished its main goal, and made him laugh.
“Reviewing failed comedies is a thankless task,” Ebert concluded. “Rereading the paragraphs above, I see I’ve tried to use logic in order to explain what went wrong with the movie. My mistake, of course, is to assume that logic has anything to do with comedy. If The Man with One Red Shoe had been funny, it wouldn’t have mattered that it was a witless remake.”
Most damningly, Ebert then dubbed The Man with One Red Shoe a “ripoff” of the original French film, instead of a remake – and when that ripoff stems from a film he had very little time for to begin with, it’s perhaps unsurprising that it only warranted a chastening single star.
