Amos & Andrew (1993)

This is a very good comedy that has you laughing regularly! The acting is superb! The plot is excellent with an accelerating number of screw ups that in the end reaches a very satisfying conclusion. A lot of so called comedies have one or two laughs in them and they've gotten better ratings than this show. This show is full of laughs and crazy situations that leave you wishing they had made a sequel. I have watched this show several times and will do so again because it is that good. If I have company and people want to watch a comedy I may drag this movie out as not many people have seen it. It always gets a positive review and a lot of laughs. Anyone rating this movie less than a 7 at least should see a therapist!

Andrew Sterling (Samuel L. Jackson) is very successful writer and a winner of Pulitzer award; and he decides to buy a vacation home on a resort in New England. In front of his house police mistakes him for a burglar. Soon Chief Tolliver (Dabney Coleman) realizes his mistake and to avoid the bad publicity, in election year, he offers Amos Odell (Nicolas Cage) a deal. Amos is just another ordinary thief, who has to pretend to take Andrew as prisoner and hold him for ransom but let him go and escape. But everything doesn't go according to the plan.Amos & Andrew is just another light comedy that you shouldn't take too seriously. It has two great actors: Cage and Jackson and few funny situations. The important part of the whole story is white and black people in America. Director E. Max Frye really puts this issue in the middle of the story and he doesn't steps on any side. He showed white people who only cares about money and power, just like Chief Tolliver (in election year). He showed black people who are obsessed with that felling that they are different from others (Andrew Sterling, Reverend Fenton Brunch) and that white people are always trying to back them down. Actually only positive character is Amos Odell. And he is criminal. Ironic, isn't it?

When famous Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sterling (Samuel L. Jackson) moves into a new home on a New England resort island, he is mistaken by his new neighbors Phil (Michael Lerner) and Judy Gillman (Margaret Colin) as a thief because they see him through his window with his stereo equipment in his hands! They call the police. The Chief of Police Cecil Talliver (Dabney Coleman) and his band of bungling deputies show-up and then the fun begins. When Talliver realizes that he and his deputies have shot at a famous man, he must engineer a cover-up by using a con-artist currently incarcerated in his jail, Amos Odell (Nicolas Cage). Dabney Colman is at his best playing this sort of incompetent pompous ass character! Samuel Jackson and Nicolas Cage are believable in their roles. The whole movie is a comedy of errors with several scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny. Entertaining!

The reviews for `Amos & Andrew' are all over the place, from Leonard Maltin's `BOMB' to The Washington Post Style section critic's rave (though the Post's Weekend section reviewer gave it a devastating pan).Any movie that gets this range of reaction is not all bad, and `Amos & Andrew' has a number of redeeming values.Its racial satire (which can be serious as well as slapstick, often in the same minute) seems a natural extension of Stanley Kramer's `The Defiant Ones' (1958). In both films, a white and a black man are handcuffed together and escaping from the law.The differences between the films are telling, however. In `Defiant,' both men are racists. They know little about each other's race, except what they think is the bad stuff (if I remember the film correctly). But both are poor and, as the film reveals, have much more in common than they thought.In `A&A,' the black man is a third generation, college-educated upper middleclass professional. He has succeeded in a white world (Pulitzer-prize; well-paid for his books and screenplays; a celebrity and a college professor; and more). But he still dislikes and distrusts whites, with reason.The white man is a drifter and petty thief, but he doesn't dislike blacks; indeed, he probably knows them better than the black man. And he's as much an outsider as the black man.These ideas, and the comedy evolving from them, make `A&A' fascinating and, sometimes in a simplistic way, thought-provoking. The humor often is sharp and funny, though it can become too silly and off the point. So the film is both clever and stupid, original and cliché.I often found myself laughing out loud as the film piled on smart gag after smart gag, slowing down only at the obvious, familiar and overplayed ones.Some may find the basic premise, a black man thought to be a burglar only because he's seen in a house in an exclusive white neighborhood, as tasteless and offensive, or at least not played out with sufficient outrage.Others may be grateful that such a pointed idea was dramatized without self-righteous anger and superiority. To them, this modest, light touch conveyed the message much more effectively, especially to those who needed to hear it, than a harder-edged film might have.Overall, there's enough good stuff in 'A&A,' including the acting by Nicholas Cage (when he still was good) and Samuel L. Jackson to push the film to a 2 ½ to 3-star rating. It's worth a look.