![]() She is rushed to a nearby hospital in a small country town called Jupiter Hollow, where everyone speaks colorfully and the aged hospital nurse hums “Amazing Grace” while delivering pills to patients. A couple are driving through open land in West Virginia, scouting sites for some kind of business transaction, when the wife goes into labor. You can practically visualize the actors gathered around a reading table, struggling hard to choke back groans of displeasure while sifting through the script pages before someone decides to speak up and say, “Hey, let’s go for broke and go over-the-top with this crap.” They are hog-tied in a screenplay that is dimwitted and force-fed, but they are aware of their plight and have immense fun at exploiting those problems to their advantage. And they do so to stellar conviction, which is how the movie finds its success. The movie is an oddity of incessant proportions, a comedy with few laughs but many unwarranted chuckles, which lives and dies on the notion its silly premise will at least be vague enough to provide its actors with great opportunities to improvise. Never mind the fact that the moment anything seems to be amiss, not one character is observant enough to point out the bizarre behavior problems they encounter. But here they are, slogging their way through material so clearly beneath their craft, barely holding composure against various plot inclinations that will require them to react to situations that are both unrealistic and downright impossible. You can practically reach out and touch the promise offered by the big names it houses: Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Edward Herman and Fred Ward, all of whom were recognizable entities of their heyday, and combined seem to contradict the very notion that any film starring them could be so deeply flawed. Deep from within the doldrums of mediocre 80s comedies, “Big Business” endures as a curiosity on the credits list of several fine actors.
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