For Richer Or Poorer (1997)

I have a problem. I watch a lot of bad movies, willingly. And it’s getting worse. Maybe it’s because of how I’m feeling these days. It is a dark time, after all. Maybe it’s a sickness I caught from my Dad who loves hate watching soap operas. Either way, I just can’t stop.

So, why do I do it? Why do I allow myself to be disappointed repeatedly like this? Why the need for more mediocrity? Well, for starters, I don’t want to be left out of the cultural conversation. But more importantly, there’s a perverse joy in writing about trash.

Call it critic’s revenge, call it what you will. Sometimes, it feels really good to vent and mock. All this self-imposed suffering shouldn’t be wasted in silence. Out of this torture must come catharsis.

In For Richer Or Poorer, the mismatched Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley are a bickering couple barely surviving high society. He’s supposed to be a high-powered real estate mogul. She’s a long-suffering socialite who would rather start her own clothing line.

After ten years of marriage, they are still trying to keep up appearances, even provoking jealousy from the likes of Marla Maples, if you can believe it, who wholeheartedly buys that everything is kosher.

But after a sales pitch for a religious-themed amusement park (far from “hilariously offensive” as intended) goes horribly wrong at their anniversary party at the Plaza in New York, when they return to their penthouse apartment, the masks come off. They’re the Roses without the violence. No decent zingers, either. Just a lot of formulaic roasting. They don’t even sleep in the same bedroom anymore.

Not helping matters is their crooked accountant Wayne Knight who has somehow implicated both of them in his own financial fraud. Their accounts get frozen and soon supremely dumb IRS agent Larry Miller is on their trail.

In a scene emblematic of the complete phoniness of this story, Miller mistakes a satellite phone Allen pulls out as a gun and immediately shoots it out of his hand. The idea that a rich white guy would ever be threatened like this by a trigger-happy white cop is beyond absurd. It’s no wonder it takes almost two hours to finally arrest the couple.

But of course, the only fraud they’ve actually committed in public is pretending they’re happy, decent people while privately, these selfish knobs are swimming in their own debt and resentments. Long story short, they end up in a stolen cab barely escaping Miller, the FBI and the NYPD who for some reason stop following them altogether after surrounding each other mistaking the IRS clown as a threat in his own right.

Riding around all night, while trying to avoid a cow in the road, they ultimately crash into a nearby pond, the cab conveniently plunging out of sight for most of the movie. Spending the night outdoors, Allen realizes they’re now in Pennsylvania Dutch territory. He overhears that a couple of cousins are supposed to arrive here in a month. Why not pretend to be those cousins showing up earlier than expected?

Using Peter Weir’s Witness as a guide, they immediately ditch the wedding rings, something they were already planning to do anyway. When Alley acts a little too normally for this crowd of stiffs, the plan is to say they both come from a more “liberal” community. Even Helen Keller would see through this bullshit.

Jay O. Sanders looks ridiculous with that Emo Phillips wig and fake beard, an appearance that to a certain degree is meant to be deceiving. He’s the head of this large brood and is more or less an amateur marriage counselor for Allen and Alley who will inevitably reconcile along the way. The problem is I never believed them as a couple in the first place.

Both instantly realize that being Amish means longer days of working and shorter nights of sleeping. While Alley works in the kitchen helping to prepare meals and in the rest of the house scrubbing floors, Allen is trying to break in Big John, a seemingly untameable horse so he can plow the fields and plant corn. He also serves as a counselor himself advising a guy on how best to get Sanders’s oldest daughter to marry him since he can’t get past his anxieties. He even helps him get a deal on some land he wants to buy for his future family, although I’m not sure his blunt technique would work in the real world. It would probably get him thrown out the door.

Allen adapts relatively quickly, even going so far as to slow grow the Abe Lincoln beard. But it takes Alley much longer. It isn’t until she learns the women hate having a lack of colour options for their drab attire that she suddenly finds a reason to start a fashion line. Even Sanders will end up wearing a flashy orange dress shirt.

Meanwhile, the couple’s scrambling attorney Michael Lerner, who instantly knows the feds have tapped his line while continually updating a frustrated Allen, is trying to locate the elusive Wayne Knight who barely manages to escape the long arm of the law himself. To not give Newman any great quips is a travesty. Perhaps he should consider himself lucky that he’s barely given any screen time once he disappears. I didn’t realize Switzerland had an extradition treaty with America. Should’ve fled to the Cayman Islands, ya boob.

All of the attempted humour here is very cheap and groany. Like the scene where Allen is asked why a married Amish man such as himself doesn’t have the Lincoln beard. Alley answers for him. It’s because he had an infestation, if you will, and had to shave it off. But it was a quick problem to solve. Blame it on the “minute lice,” she says.

During the sales pitch for The Holy Land, the misbegotten theme park proposal, Allen talks about an exhibit he plans to call Torah! Torah! Torah!, in honour of the holy book of Judaism. Thinking cross-promotionally, he also says the Japanese will flip for it, too. You know, Tora! Tora! Tora! Yeah, pretty fucking lame, guy.

Because Sanders plays a character named Samuel and even named his baby after himself, when the kid cries one night while everybody is gathered and awake, and Alley finds out his name, she refers to him flippantly as “another son of Sam”. We get it. Make it stop.

Not only is there not one laugh in For Richer Or Poorer, there’s no sincerity, either. This might be the phoniest movie I’ve ever seen. Allen and Alley are fakes, as is Maples, Knight is a crook, Miller has no business carrying a gun and even the Amish turn out to be full of shit. In the inevitable scene when Miller and the cops finally swoop in at the worst possible time, Sanders and company act as though they’ve been betrayed when they obviously know the real cousins they’re expecting who conveniently show up at the exact same time as the feds.

There’s a bogus courtroom scene where Lerner earns his money at the last minute but I’m not sure justice is served. That cabbie can’t possibly be happy. And then the expected reconciliation with Sanders and his wife. It’s not necessary when no one is upset. Why’d they string them along? And why do they even give a shit about their marital problems? There’s no pay-off here.

Same with the scene where Allen gives Sanders a parting gift as a thank you for all his hospitality and advice. I actually had to look up the Wikipedia summary to find out what’s actually hidden in the back of that antique stop watch he gives Sanders since his facial expressions left me confused. He can’t sell shit.

For Richer Or Poorer was released in late 1997 and was directed by Bryan Spicer. His first film was the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie. It’s slightly less bad than this steaming pile of dung. For Richer Or Poorer performed so horribly with audiences and critics, Spicer never directed another feature film again.

He figured out the only way to get me to stop watching bad movies. He stopped making them altogether.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, March 18, 2024
3:49 a.m.