“He’s in the movie business.”
The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997) is a spy comedy that takes its cues from the films of Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts. Bill Murray plays the titular imbecile who inadvertently prevents the start of a new Cold War when he thinks he is in a “living theatre” performance. As outlandish as it may sound, the premise makes for an excellent deconstruction of the espionage genre, lampooning the genre from Hitchcock to James Bond.
Murray is excellent as the naive moron. His character fills in the Don Knotts role (thinking The Reluctant Astronaut) but draws on Murray’s earlier performance in What About Bob? (1991). Murray’s character functions as the anti-Bond whom fate has decided to bless. Murray’s ongoing commentary pulls the curtain back on the archetypal secret agent character personified by Bond. Murray’s Blockbuster Video clerk disassembles every scene, reducing it to its essentials which, when laid bare, are so preposterous that they are hilarious.
This is the crux of the comedy in The Man Who Knew Too Little. But beyond that the film is dressed up for more laughs with slapstick routines, mistaken identities and anti-British asides. From top to bottom the film is designed to get big laughs and it delivers far more often than it fails. The plot holes are hardly noticeable because the gags are so good and so plentiful.
The one real weakness of the film is that, by the end, the plot is too busy. It isn’t confusing, simply convoluted to the point that the gags become more intermittent. When the film is streamlined and focused on Murray and Joanne Whalley running around looking for letters it is at its strongest. It is in the first two acts that The Man Who Knew Too Little rivals the comedies of Jerry Lewis for pure and precise insanity.
So few films can be as inspired in their lunacy as The Man Who Knew Too Little and yet remain focused enough that the film still works. The Man Who Knew Too Little, even when it becomes overly convoluted, is still exact in its genre deconstruction. This places it with post-modern parodies like Innerspace (1987) that manage to have their cake and eat it too.
The Man Who Knew Too Little has never really been all that popular despite the laughs and the cast. It’s remained one of those forgotten Bill Murray comedies from the nineties. As such, it deserves reevaluation and discovery. Like Clifford (1994), The Man Who Knew Too Little is one of the great comedy films of the nineties too few people know about or appreciate.
