Overboard (1987)

(In French, On TV, September 2019) You don’t have to go back all that far in time to find movies with premises that seem unacceptable by today’s standards. With Overboard, for instance, we have a man taking revenge over a rich woman by making her believe that she’s his wife after she suffers a comprehensive case of amnesia. There are complications, and the film tries its best to not make it extra-creepy, but that’s still a film based on an extended series of lies passing itself off as a comedy. (Significantly enough, when the film was remade in 2018, the genders were swapped, and several other details were added to make less creepy.) You can either take the premise as-is, or have a hard time with the film. If you’re the forgiving suspension-of-reality type, you’ll find that the result is a middle-of-the-road 1980s comedy, albeit once with the great good sense of having husband-and-wife Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell in the lead roles, leading to quite a bit more chemistry than usual. Considering the average nature of the film and its humour, it’s a good thing that at least the lead performances are watchable. The belligerent romantic tension works within the premise of the film, although there’s a layer of discomfort that’s also built into it. Overboard is not exactly an essential, not exactly a dud, just a film that gives its actors just enough slack to pull the film on their own shoulders.