Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1996 CM Media, Inc.
Michael (1996)
The premise of “Michael” is that an angel comes to Earth and proves to be a cigarette-smoking hedonist. All I can say is, at least Van Halen was smart enough to leave it an album cover.
This
romance/comedy/New Age rip-off comes from Nora Ephron,
the OK screenwriter who was promoted above her talents a few years ago and now
directs. A total sniveling simp and bona fide idiot,
she nonetheless snowed the world in ’93 with the dreadful “Sleepless in
Her true colors showed in the 1994 Christmas comedy “Mixed Nuts,” a uniquely awful bomb she co-wrote with sister Delia. Exhibiting fewer learning skills than the average lab rat, she went ahead and got Delia to rewrite the script for this Christmas comedy. No surprise that, like “Mixed Nuts,” it’s an extremely weak, episodic story that basically throws up its hands and prays a big-name cast will rescue it.
John Travolta is certainly the movie lifeguard of the ’90s, performing his pursed-lip CPR on shaky efforts like “Phenomenon” and “Get Shorty.” But the role of the angel is too much of a one-joke ham job for him to resist. Travolta can bring many things to a role, but dignity usually isn’t one of them. And yes, he dances.
He does get a couple funny lines, and fights a bull in one of the most bizarre scenes in film history. It’s shocking enough to be called funny, I guess.
Then there are the tabloid reporters who want to capitalize on the angel, all played the way you’d expect: William Hurt (bemused), Andie MacDowell (earnestly pretty), Robert Pastorelli (forgettable) and Bob Hoskins (still thinks he has Roger Rabbit cuffed to his arm).
In short, nobody is able to ennoble this utter pop junk with its cute doggies and scruffy angel and two complete jaunty songs before there’s even any dialogue.
This is a film that shamelessly kills a puppy to beat tears out of the audience. And if you think that’s bad, understand that the film’s key scene is a debate on whether the angel can bring the dog back to life.
And that’s before the angel gets sick and starts losing feathers, and Hurt has a crisis of faith, and Hurt and MacDowell fall in love (more apt title: “Cupid”), and ghosts and angels and fate make everybody happy. It’s an emotional slasher flick, splattering sentiment instead of gore.