The Dream Team (1989)

(In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) Michael Keaton spent much of the 1980s starring in various comic vehicles of varying interest, and it’s interesting to note that one of the least engaging of them, The Dream Team, was released the same year that Batman raised him to a different class of actor. Little superheroism shows up here as the film sets up its dicey premise: what if a psychiatrist took four patients from the asylum to a baseball game in the heart of Manhattan? What if, to make it even more interesting, he was suddenly incapacitated and his charges were left to roam the city? Fortunately, The Dream Team is a comedy rather than anything else, and so the film sets out to show how our characters can act sane in an insane city and do some self-therapy along the way. Mix in a criminal subplot and you’ve got the bare essentials of an unthreatening Hollywood mental illness comedy in which all you need is love and unsupervised time. The biggest problem with The Dream Team is that while it has the bare foundation for a comic film, it doesn’t have much more. There are few laughs, few comic set-pieces, and quite a bit of excessive sentiment that often gives the impression of trivializing the issues it touches. Keaton is fun to watch—especially given that the film makes sure that his issues are not too severe—and the film does benefit from such comedy notables as Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle. But the potential of the film remains largely unrealized.