johnvburke-86483

Watching this in a grind house during his Hollywood years, S. J. Perelman imagined a studio exec, seeking vainly for plausibility, asking the writer about the mad scientist character: "But what business is this guy in?" It's also arguably the source for a great Perelman line: "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

This is good stuff for dialog writing, acting, location work (Bangkok! New Zealand!). and two strong, appealing female leads whose growing friendship is a pleasure to see. That said, though, there are a couple of plot devices that I started to get tired of. One is the hairsbreadth escape: one of the leads is cornered, in an impossible situation, with a bad guy's gun pointed directly at her head, and poof! something intervenes just when all looks hopeless. This happens too many times to be believed; I'm willing to suspend disbelief but not hang it from the rafters. The second is the partners-almost-split-up scene: "That's it, you need to go on without me," yet every single time, they stick together. And finally, I think the writers went to the MacGuffin shelf too often: the pair are searching for a pile of cash, no, a stash of drugs, no, the car containing both, no, a safe deposit box key... I can see why something like this would have seemed like a handy way to keep the story line going, but it started to get tiresome for me.