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Alibi, The
Smoke and mirrors comedy with Steve Coogan as a scam-monger who uses every trick he knows to stay out of trouble after a job goes very wrong
An agency that covers clients' tracks when they're conducting an affair may be a ludicrous idea in the real world, but it's precisely the sort of thing you want in a comic-thriller. Here, Steve Coogan runs just such a business with fast-thinking operators diverting calls and offering iron-clad excuses whenever a spouse's spider-senses are a-tingling. We get the whole unlikely set-up explained to us as Coogan sounds out a potential new employee, Lola (Romijn), who, following a chance encounter with Henry Rollins (just one of the many 'is that really him?' faces in the film), proves her not inconsiderable steel by getting naughty James Brolin off the hook when his wife turns up to see what he's been doing in a fancy hotel. It's unclear whether there's supposed to be an initial attraction between Coogan and Romijn; they're either very good at playing icy misanthropes whose cynicism has left them wary of personal involvement, or there's as little chemistry between the leads here as there was between Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in The Avengers. Brolin is so impressed with the service, he demands that Coogan provides a hitch-free fling for his about-to-be married son, Wendell (Marsden). Coogan's solution is to swap identities with Marsden for the duration of the extended knee-trembler, taking his place at an out-of-town conference. Before you can say, 'what could possibly go wrong?' Wendell has indulged in some terminal asphyxiation sex-play, leaving his blonde bit on the side blue in the face. This is particularly bad news for Coogan as he is officially Wendell at this point. What follows is a complex series of threats including a Mormon hitman (Elliott) and one of his flirtatious brides (Blair), the dead girl's boyfriend and his posse, Brolin and son plus suspicious cop Debi Mazar, all threatening to put Coogan out of business permanently. Coogan's solution is an elaborate scheme to sort out all these problems at once. Seeing this executed is rather like the 1960s 'Mission: Impossible' TV series where you didn't care one jot about whether the military of 'Zamtovestan' got their hands on a missile tracking system, just so long as Peter Graves and Co. managed to orchestrate a fiendish con to get everyone where they wanted before striding off scott-free. Your attention's mostly on following the set pieces and the convoluted plot rather than being bothered about whether Coogan will escape with his life or wind up in bed with Romijn. Coogan is a fine comic performer but he isn't given much comedy to perform here, his role requiring him to stay detached throughout, which makes it doubly hard to accept him as a romantic lead when it suits the script. While the film is a comedy-thriller it seems to think the two styles are mutually exclusive. The press used to call Coogan the new Peter Sellers, but this is no Return Of The Pink Panther. The Alibi is fun but doesn't gel anything like as successfully as it could have. All the elements are there and the cast is certainly capable but the result is a movie more concerned with its plot than its characters, and that doesn't make for successful comedy. Verdict Worth a look but this isn't going to help advance Coogan's US career. |
