"There is nothing worse than an unfunny comedy" - Michael J. Nelson
I've never read the Carl Hiaasen novel, but friends swear to me that its hilarious in an Elmore Leonard smart-ass/black comedy sort of way. It knows its own plot is pretty damn goofy, and everyone is in the joke, even the luckless heroine.
Too bad Demi Moore didn't read the book.
STRIPTEASE opens in a courtroom where former FBI worker Demi Moore loses custody of her daughter to her scumbag ex-husband. Why is he a scumbag? Because anyone with a big black mustache and a redneck accent must have to be the villain when compared to a starlet like Moore.
Anyway, this is a very serious yet silly melodrama with Demi Moore having to struggle against the evil sexist society this side of Sally Field, while having to work as a strippper to afford the appeal. This movie could have been titled NOT WITHOUT MY TITS.
Moore stays in this mode for the entire movie. No really, she actually is goddamn serious while everyone else in STRIPTEASE is relaxed and trying to be funny. And I stress trying because jokes fly all over the place, but like a strip club customer's dreams of having non-solicited sex with an exotic dancer, they all crash and burn.
You have the great Ving Rhames firing off gags about insect yogurt, the strip joint owner with the fetish for nude cream corn wrestling, and even the Jewish stripper who states over and over again her disturbing fixiation on Steven Spielberg. Surely he learned his lesson from Amy Irving.
Nevermind Burt Reynolds as the perverted Florida Congressman who lubes himself up (!) before speaking to a church convention. Everyone tries to be wacky but its end up being only awkward this side of HUDSON HAWK, absent a forgiving cultdom.
Rhames, Reynolds, and Robert Patrick are proven good actors, or at least game for comedy work, but they absolutely fail. Maybe the blame has to go to scripter/director Andrew Bergman. In the decade of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, Bergman was trying to be self-conciously witty and hip that is "post-modernistic humor."
Instead, he won the top Razzie for the worst movie of 1996. Considering that STRIPTEASE beat out a potent list of turkeys that include the infamous monkey flick ED, the goofy blockbuster INDEPENDENCE DAY, and Pauly Shore's BIO-DOME....that's actually pretty damn impressive.
Back in the day there was so much press, and so many horny guys and young boys tripped up, about the fact that Moore flashed her tits for a then-record $12.5 million paycheck. Yet when we do finally see her peaks, its really symbolic of what STRIPTEASE really is, for her silicone breasts are bulky, discolored, and rather damn ugly.
In fact, imagine if her character had never gotten those implants. She would have had the cash to win her damn kid back, and there would be been no reason for this boob in the first place.
