The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)
Starring Eddie Murphy, Randy Quaid, Rosario Dawson, Joe Napolitano, Jay Mohr, Luis Guzmán, James Rebhorn, Peter Boyle, Pam Grier, Burt Young, John Cleese
Director of Photography: Oliver Wood
Music by John Powell
Edited by Alan Heim, Paul Hirsch
Written by Neil Cuthbert
Directed by Ron Underwood
Rating: 2 out of 10

I feel almost bad writing about The Adventures of Pluto Nash, because the movie is so stupid and annoying, getting back at it is a real drag. It is not funny, it is not exciting and that’s about all the adjectives you would want from this kind of movie. Everyone looks bored, nothing makes the slightest sense (seriously), the effects look incredibly terrible for a $100 million movie (that made $7 million at the box office) and you will see all the actors involved with different eyes because whenever you see them again in the future, you will be reminded of this movie, asking “Why?” again and again. I don’t think Randy Quaid is a great actor, but his performance here is beyond belief. It's really no surprise I picked this as the worst movie of the last three months. Just look at the stupid poster.

Anyway, let’s get this over with. Apart from everything else, the movie is also terribly misogynistic. There is only one woman of note, played by Rosario Dawson, and the movie constantly makes it clear that she is helpless, incompetent and a sex object. Which is hard to pull off with an actress by Dawson but this movie likes its challenges. She wants Pluto Nash (Eddie Murphy) to help her find a job on the moon, where this disaster is set. He helps her and then she just continues hanging around him for no apparent reason. Sure, later she turns into something like a love interest, but that too is not convincing at all. There is a scene where Pluto gets caught by some bad guys and some shooting, so she is supposed to help him, but… man, this is so terrible, I don’t even want to look at it again. What they are trying to convey is that she (and women in general) are not good at shooting guns, but it ends up making her look like she is not good at moving her arms or standing or holding something in her hand. She wildly swings the gun around like an idiot and the viewer knows instinctively that women do stupid things like that. She blows up everything and two men have to jump in and stop her. It is one of the worst moments I saw in a movie in the last year.

There is another scene where Murphy makes jokes about her ass and Luis Guzman plays an android pimp who makes rape jokes and Randy Quaid plays an android who is constantly horny and there is a female android that just exists to drop something so she can bow down and present her ass, but seriously, all of this is less offensive to me than the previous scene. I don’t know why exactly because the other scenes are certainly more sexist, but the gun shooting is so incredibly dumb and incompetently done that it is stuck in my head, while the rest vanishes in a cloud of oblivious misogyny. What a terrible movie. I’m really happy I can leave it behind me now.