Near Mrs.

My review was written in August 1992 after watching the movie on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.

Made for the cable and video market, "Near Misses" is a hopelessly dated comedy directed and performed by the numbers.

Judge Reinhold and Casey Siemaszko are the American talent in this exercise, originally titled "Last Tangle in Paris". Sitcom has Reinhold as a bigamist (with wives in Phoenix and L. A.) who works at a big research firm.

He's also in the Marine reserves and lazily decides to get minor employee Siemaszko to impersonate him for the required two weeks of reserve duty in Paris. Complications ensue when the Soviets kidnap Siemaszko in order to get satellite secrets known by Reinhold. Reinhold has to go to Paris to straighten things out, but both wives show up there looking for him.

Predictable mistaken identity gimmicks occur. Film's Cold War politics are presented as if nothing had happened recently in the former Soviet Union, destroying any viewer interest in the mechanics of the farce. Reinhold overplays his reactions to frequent crises while Siemaszko is too low-key. Rebecca Pauly and Cecile Paoli brighten things up as the wives.