Besides being generally awful, the most annoying thing about An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is how it never fluctuates. Once the director–Arthur Hiller took his name off, amusingly not as a publicity stunt but because of writer Joe Eszterhas–and Eszterhas’s script establish the rather paltry quality of the plot and the jokes, it never changes. It’s unrelentingly misguided, mean-spirited, misogynistic (but Eszterhas identifies all the females–except Whoopi Goldberg–as feminists, so it must be all right) and not funny.
Poor Sylvester Stallone is actually amusing, while Goldberg comes off as a punchline parody of herself. Jackie Chan’s playing a moronic, stereotypical Asian guy. But the regular cast–those three figure into the movie within a movie–is even more uneven. Ryan O’Neal tries but it’s obvious he knows he’s doing tripe. During one scene, as the film’s a mock documentary (apparently Eszterhas has never seen an actual documentary), O’Neal is visibly surprised at the level of bad acting from Richard Jeni.
Jeni gets some of the film’s worst material. Still, he’s real bad.
As for the titular director, Eric Idle’s also real bad. Ezsterhas’s approach–the documentary–could be seen as a way to save money (instead of telling the actual story) but it also appears he doesn’t have much of a story to tell. Even within a story.
So there are crappy cameos and stunt casting.
Even when the scenes are supposed to be sincere, either the actors flop or the script immediately discredits the idea of sincerity.
It’s a terrible film.
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