The Survivors (1983)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2019) You would think that a Robin Williams/Walter Matthau pairing would be comedy heaven, but the truth as proven by The Survivors (for this is the only such pairing) is that it just ends up being a mess. The roots of the problem go back to a meandering script with poor tonal control and what seems like few ideas about where it’s going. Williams doesn’t get a chance to work in his best comic range, although Matthau does a bit better in a role suited to his persona—some of the film’s best and funniest sequences are those in which his characters use his experience and hidden skills to try to control the excesses of his younger co-star. Still, there are plenty of missteps along the way, including a wholly unsatisfying redemption arc for the film’s villain that undercuts most of the (thin) emotional involvement of the audience in the film. There’s some material here about survivalists and a jaundiced perception of New York City that still plays well, but it’s really not enough. The lunacy of the script seems scattershot (sometimes featuring an employee-firing parrot, sometimes mired in urban grittiness). Now little known outside being a part of its two co-stars’ filmography, The Survivors isn’t a particularly shining example of early-1980s comedy.