# Rocket Man (1997)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

Too bad Hollywood can't just find a way to clone Jim Carrey. That would save the rest of us from the long line of Carrey wannabes who've tried to get their own piece of the action.

The latest pretender to Carrey's porcelain throne is Harland Williams, who seems to fancy himself as a cross between Pee Wee Herman and a geekier John Cusack, and the best that can be said about his performance in ``RocketMan'' is that it's not consistently irritating, just frequently irritating. With a better vehicle, who knows? He might end up being just occasionally irritating.

``RocketMan'' could prove to be a real side-splitter for little boys under the age of 12 or for their bigger brothers, provided they have a blood-alcohol level of .12.

No doubt the screenwriters used their best crayons to scribble down this yarn about a doofus computer programmer named Fred Randall (Williams) who, through a remarkably flimsy and inane set of circumstances, winds up being picked to join an expedition heading to Mars. The rest of the crew includes skeptical veteran astronaut Bill Overbeck (William Sadler) and a chimpanzee named Ulysses who seems to be onboard solely to complicate Fred's life and to react to his oh-so-zany shenanigans, which include hanging his boxer shorts in place of the American flag on the surface of Mars and coercing everyone on Earth to join him in singing ``He's Got The Whole World In His Hands.''

Actually, Fred seems to burst into song quite regularly and never quite tunefully. When he's not warbling a tune, you can rest assured he's making a mess of the mission, accidentally serving hemorrhoid cream for dinner and literally bouncing off the walls when he's locked out of his ``hypersleep chamber.'' He also passes gas into Bill's spacesuit in a scene that climaxes - like many of Fred's foul-ups - with the lovable nerd squealing ``It wasn't me!''

      Oh that Fred: He's such a card, you just want to deck him.

To be fair, there are a few bright bits in ``RocketMan,'' scattered through the story like a handful of diamonds at the garbage dump. And the movie gains a wee bit of an edge for having the audacity to cast Sadler as something other than a psychopathic killer. More often than not the jokes fall flat, but director Stuart Gilland at least manages to keep the film moving along.

With this past summer's Mars mania, this would seem an opportune time for another movie revolving around the space program. But in the end, the only thing ``RocketMan'' has in common with ``Contact'' is that they're both in color.

    James Sanford

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