When a young heiress is kidnapped, her wealthy father turns to Crumb & Crumb for a private investigator. And lucky him, Harry Crumb (John Candy) just happens to be available to take the case! Except, well, there's a saying, the first generation builds the company, the second maintains it, and the third ruins it? Harry's a third generation Crumb in the P.I. biz.
Crumb is not quite Inspector Gadget. Sometimes he demonstrates a pretty good memory, though at other times, he will misuse a word off his word-a-day calendar, or somehow misremember the word off the calendar. He knows all sorts of random trivia about fly fishing or classic automobiles, but can't actually read lips worth a damn. His ridiculous disguises somehow work, but he apparently never looks at the clandestine photographs the disguises give him chances to take before showing them to anyone.
So maybe it's a case of having book learning, but limited ability at practical application. Except the guy has been working as an investigator for a while, so that seems more like incompetence. He really does thwart the scheme by almost a fluke of circumstance. The circumstance being there are two, independent, plots to get money out of Mr. Downing. Crumb has one set of culprits figured out, but, because he's unaware there are two plots, tied to the wrong one.
Jeffrey Jones plays Crumb's boss with as a mixture of conniving shitheel, and a whipped lickspittle. His motivations do at least explain why he would assign such a boob as Harry Crumb to work on the case of such a wealthy client. Crumb ends up with a sidekick in Downing's younger daughter (played by Shawnee Smith), and there's a decent friendship built between her and Crumb. Candy's ability to play a bumbling, but nonetheless kind and well-meaning person cuts through a teenager's suspicion of people trying to be charming, and they bond over both feeling like they don't measure up in their parents' eyes.
Those three carry the film, the rest of the cast is not given a chance to be much more than furniture. The kidnapped daughter spends her few scenes in a cage, looking terrified of the creepy weirdo that abducted her, who spends those few scenes being creepy and brandishing a cattle prod. There's a police lieutenant around to be hostile and contemptuous of Harry, but she's there just enough to be proven wrong when it really counts. Annie Potts plays Downing's new wife, and she's very good at making her seem like a horrible person with no morals, but I could not see how she had so much power over all these guys. Even when she's trying to be alluring or pleasant, it just comes off as sleazy. Love is blind.
There are some good random jokes in there. The one about Crumb's fondness for foreign languages got a laugh. I rolled my eyes at the first mention of his 'black belt in akido, with the boots to match,' but I have to give it credit, they paid that off at the end. Jones trying to protect his prized, fossilized dinosaur egg from Crumb earned a couple of snorts. As an '80s comedy goes, it beat the hell out of Throw Momma from the Train.
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