{"id":17842,"date":"2015-12-10T15:06:46","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T20:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=17842"},"modified":"2015-12-10T15:06:46","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T20:06:46","slug":"dutch-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/10\/dutch-1991\/","title":{"rendered":"Dutch (1991)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2mflkj8\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in 1991, I was a big fan of \u201cMarried with Children,\u201d and loved Ed O\u2019Neill. He was raucously funny as the blue collared Al Bundy, whose life was an endless series of misfortunes, so a big screen career seemed only a natural next step. I never caught \u201cDutch,\u201d however I do fondly remember it as the failed big screen feature of O\u2019Neill\u2019s that became a consistent running joke on his hit sitcom. You can even see a \u201cDutch\u201d standee during an episode where Al and Peggy are in a video store, promising a free copy for all customers<\/strong><\/a>. Oddly enough, \u201cDutch\u201d isn\u2019t that bad.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Its reputation for being a royally awful vehicle for O\u2019Neill is a bit over the top. I wouldn\u2019t call \u201cDutch\u201d awful. It\u2019s just not a great movie; it\u2019s more mediocre, when you dissect the whole experience. And compared to past John Hughes penned movies, it barely stacks up as third tier comedy. If \u201cDutch\u201d deserves any kind of scorn it\u2019s for John Hughes basically repeating himself twice over, and never delivering anything interesting from it. This is the chance for Ed O\u2019Neill to really show he\u2019s capable of being a big screen star in his own right, and he\u2019s handed recycled John Hughes geared toward an R rating. O\u2019Neill plays Dutch Dooley, a hard working and successful butcher who has fallen in love with a wealthy divorced mother (Jobeth Williams) who is at the mercy of her slimy ex-husband.<\/p>\n

Her son Doyle (Ethan Embry) has been trained to resent her, and doesn\u2019t mind making everyone\u2019s life miserable as a petulant rich student at a boarding school. Dutch offers to pick Doyle up from his school and take him home by Thanksgiving to share dinner with the family, and Dutch soon finds bonding with Doyle to be pure hell. Doyle is relentless in his rude and snobbish behavior, prompting a lot of misadventures on the road for Dutch, whose tolerance for his attitude is tested over and over. O\u2019Neill is charming enough as a hard working Joe trying to bond with Doyle, but Doyle never quite redeems himself. Even in the finale when Dutch and Doyle have no choice but to stay at a homeless shelter, Doyle is still utterly obnoxious despite bonding with an African American family and their toddler daughter.<\/p>\n

Dutch and Doyle\u2019s chemistry is fine enough, but a lot of their interplay seems regurgitated and pretty old hat, almost like Hughes took rejected scenes from \u201cUncle Buck<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCurly Sue\u201d and planted them hoping O\u2019Neill would pull them off. \u201cDutch\u201d is pretty much \u201cPlanes Trains and Automobiles,\u201d if Buck and niece Tia from \u201cUncle Buck\u201d were forced together on a road trip, instead of main characters Doyle and Dutch. Snot nosed little punk Doyle is essentially Tia, right down to the scowl, and constant berating of the lower class role model, and there\u2019s just no new ground covered here. It\u2019s not Hughes\u2019 worst comedy effort by far, but it surely is by no means his best, and \u201cDutch\u201d ends as a purely tolerable drama comedy with occasional chuckles and solid performances all around. When \u201cUncle Buck\u201d ended I wanted to see more of the characters. When \u201cDutch\u201d comes to an end, I was satisfied seeing the narrative resolve, allowing me to move on to something so much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 1991, I was a big fan of \u201cMarried with Children,\u201d and loved Ed O\u2019Neill. He was raucously funny as the blue collared Al Bundy, whose life was an endless series of misfortunes, so a big screen career seemed only a natural next step. I never caught \u201cDutch,\u201d however I do fondly remember it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[71,219,249,302,340,471,555,631,851],"class_list":["post-17842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-adventure","tag-comedy","tag-d","tag-drama","tag-family","tag-holiday","tag-john-hughes","tag-martial-arts","tag-road-trip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17845,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17842\/revisions\/17845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}