Easy Money (1983)

(On Cable TV, May 2019) I have a growing suspicion that Rodney Dangerfield is best used as a supporting character (à la Caddyshack) than a leading man, and here comes Easy Money to reinforce my theory. It doesn’t take a lot of Dangerfield in this film to get tired of his blue-collar loser antics, straight-up early-eighties slobs-versus-snobs cheap comedy. The premise is simple enough to make you wonder why it hasn’t been re-used elsewhere: a man is promised a significant inheritance if he can just shape up for a year. Of course, that’s really a clothesline to hang a series of gags about an ordinary guy trying to control his ordinary-guy urges. It doesn’t always work but the film does hand him a victory at the end. (Dangerfield being Dangerfield, there’s no suspense as to where the coin will fall; plus he looks the same at the beginning of the year-long improvement plan than at the end.) The result is not exactly bad, but sometimes Dangerfield gets to be a bit too much, and Easy Money would be better with less of him in it—a curious thing to say about a star vehicle, but then again there are stars for whom the movie works in spite of them.