Excess Baggage

with Alicia Silverstone, Benicio Del Toro, Christopher Walken, Harry Connick Jr.
Directed by Marco Brambilla
Written by Max D. Adams
by Scott Hefflon

To say this movie limped through every cliché in the book should be an obvious statement. Co-produced and starring Alicia Silverstone, Excess Baggage could’ve been cute as her round, button face (what the hell is with all that black shit? Unlike the “weirdo” in The Breakfast Club, she looks like a teeny-bopper raccoon instead of a bratty rich chick pissed off ’cause her daddy neglects her), but instead it milks every plot devise it can, and invents more when the well runs dry. Fortunately, Del Toro uses his slow-talking, “Ima-thinkin’ ’bout it” charm to build a very likable character out of a car thief in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, he doesn’t exactly help the plot move along very swiftly, not that there’s much plot to move. He steals a car with her in the trunk, thus botching her self-kidnapping attempt, and suddenly Uncle Ray (Walken), the Mob (hey, why not), and his partner (Connick Jr.) are all after him. The movie would’ve sucked less if it used the “characters with nothing in common thrown into an unlikely situation grow to care about each other” motif (it did, but not a helluva lot). Instead it fabricated absurd roadblocks for our mis-matched team to encounter. Excess Baggage is too slow to be an action movie, too under-developed to be a love story, and, well, what else is there?