The Wrong Guy, now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, is a one-joke movie, but thankfully it’s a very funny joke.
Dave Foley (who co-wrote the script alongside co-star David Anthony Higgins and Simpsons legend Jay Kogen) stars as Nelson Hibbert, a vanilla-to-the-point-of-sociopathy nobody whose entire existence is spun around climbing the corporate ladder. Nelson’s the kind of guy who speaks entirely in weird non sequiturs that may as well have been gleamed from small talk seminars. Advancing in business is not just Nelson’s ambition; the lust for it has subsumed his entire existence. He’s even gone ahead and gotten engaged to the boss’s daughter in the hopes of sealing the deal on a promotion. So when he gets passed over (in favor of the dirtbag who’s engaged to the boss’s favorite daughter), Nelson flips out and loudly declares that he’s going to murder the jerk, only to later stumble over his boss’s freshly-expired corpse with a knife stuck in his back. Nelson’s attempt to extricate himself from the room results in him being covered head-to-toe in blood while brandishing a knife and a crazed look in front of the entire office. Believing that everyone believes he is a murderer, Nelson goes on the run.
You’ve seen this sort of “wrong man” riff a thousand times (it seems like pretty much every comedic star in the ‘80s and ‘90s was mandated to do a version), but The Wrong Guy puts its own spin on the joke. See, the cops know almost immediately that Nelson didn’t kill the guy. Security cameras clearly show a professional assassin (Colm Feore) doing the deed. But Nelson is convinced that he is now the most wanted man in America, and as he makes a break for Mexico, his path keeps intertwining with The Killer’s, causing more and more mix-ups and confusion.
At its absolute best, The Wrong Guy plays like a great, lost Simpsons episode. The gags are fast and furious, and a truly deadly mixture of highbrow wordplay and wit with shotgun blasts of broad slapstick. There’s also an almost casual surrealism to this world, with running gags like co-writer Higgins as the detective assigned to the case using FBI resources to fly a helicopter to see his sister a couple cities over, attend Moby Dick on Broadway, and commandeer an old man’s Rascal scooter so he won’t have to walk twenty feet. Another runner sees Foley taken in by a kindly man trying to keep his family bank afloat, despite the evil machinations of the cruel farmers out to ruin him.
“Be sure nice to tear this bank down and plant me a fresh crop of corn,” goes one particular snarl.
At the center of all this madness is Foley, who has since gone on to cite this forgotten curiosity as his favorite work of his own. Foley was and is perhaps the industry’s best straightman, with a positively killer deadpan that served him well at the center of such maelstroms of madness as The Kids in the Hall and Newsradio. Like Graham Chapman in the various Monty Python features, Foley’s brilliance came from his refusal to surrender his rumpled sense of dignity, even while being beset by all manner of freaks and perverts. Foley can still demolish a well-timed one-liner (as seen in some recent episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but nowadays it comes more from the absence of dignity, from the broken, defeated look on his face as he tries to make it through the day.
With The Wrong Guy, Foley takes the innate blandness of his features and takes them to absurdist, at times even disturbing extremes. Nelson Hibbert is the sort of man that people forget what he looks like even as they are still looking at him (he’s also repeatedly mistaken for a woman by a number of independent parties). Foley attacks every scene like any one could be the one that puts him over the top into movie stardom, and if nothing else, The Wrong Guy illustrates just how varied Foley’s skillset was, and how furiously committed he could be to his material.
If The Wrong Guy succeeds as a Foley showcase/extended Kids in the Hall skit/live action Simpsons episode, it struggles to get over the finish line as a feature film. At a little over the halfway mark the wild chase grinds to a halt so Nelson can fall in love with a narcoleptic beauty played by Jennifer Tilly, and you can feel the film itself shuttering to a standstill. Tilly’s not bad (nothing but love for the bride of Chucky), but she’s stuck playing a character who is so completely The Girl, who exists solely to win our hero’s heart and help him become a hero, and the attempts to give her more lively material to play (i.e. the aforementioned narcolepsy) are some of the sweatiest, weakest material in the entire film.
The thinness of Tilly’s material belies the lightweight nature of the entire film. Like I said at the top, The Wrong Guy is essentially a one-joke movie, and you can feel Foley, his co-writers, and director David Steinberg all straining more and more as the film goes along to pad that joke out to feature length. They get there eventually (and do a better job of it than the actual Kids in the Hall movie, Brain Candy), but the stretch marks are pretty apparent.
The Wrong Guy never got a US release when it first came out in the 1997, and today exists largely as a footnote in Foley’s career. He didn’t get a great many shots at traditional leading man roles in features (it’s basically this and A Bug’s Life), which only further lends to The Wrong Guy’s aura as a trial balloon that was shot down before it even left the ground.
And that’s a real shame. The Wrong Guy may be a trifle, but it’s a consistently funny and at times legitimately hilarious trifle, and that’s not an easy thing to accomplish. The Wrong Guy really should have been an exciting beginning that led to greater things, and instead it ended up being an ending.
Still, if you are a fan of Foley, or this era of comedy in general (the period of Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, The State, etc.) there’s very good reason to assume that you have never heard of this film, and would seriously enjoy it.