Funny as it remains, Airplane! may have done for American comedy what Halloween did for horror films. While its laugh-a-second philosophy owes something to the anarchic tradition of the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks, the spitballing gags are almost all non sequiturs, only incidentally tied to a character, a situation, or any kind of narrative structure. In this spirit, quantity tends to mean more than quality in today's comedies: The merits of a good one versus a bad one could probably be expressed in a box score. The fun comes from minor details and throwaways rather than a grand farcical plan, which results in a lot of uneven, junky entertainment. Why is there a pirate in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story? Because someone thinks pirates are hilarious.
Early in The Last Shot, the middling directorial debut of screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, FBI agent Alec Baldwin comes home to discover that his beloved dog has died. Not only that, but his maid tells him the lonely mutt committed suicide by drowning herself in a Jacuzzi, which in turn leads to the ridiculous spectacle of lavish, full-scale Hollywood funeral rites. Over-cast, overwritten, and overstuffed with this sort of comedic flotsam, The Last Shot tries too hard to push across jokes that are often funny enough without the exclamation points. Eventually, the flop-sweat starts to drip. Given an irresistible premise, Nathanson doesn't trust his material enough to follow through without excessive mugging, but his sense of the absurd leads to amusing digressions along the way.
Based on a true story, though probably not too closely, the film opens in December 1985, when authorities stepped up their operations on mob boss John Gotti following a restaurant hit. Transferred from Houston to Providence, Baldwin gets the low-level assignment of following Gotti's second cousin (Tony Shalhoub) and his cronies, who control the city's Teamsters Union. As part of an elaborate sting operation, Baldwin poses as a movie producer to expose the local mob racket, but after hiring neophyte writer-director Matthew Broderick, washed-up actress Toni Collette, and principal cast and crew, his David O. Selznick impersonation takes on a life of its own.
The Last Shot works much like its lame movie-within-a-movie predecessor Bowfinger, but in the absence of big comedic payoffs, Nathanson's busy script sketches some convulsively funny bits in the margins. Most of the keepers are offbeat and random: manic producer Joan Cusack claiming she knows about cops because she "used to date the black guy" from Hill Street Blues, Collette dropping a casual reference to her late-term abortion over dinner, or Broderick's glee when he finds out Pat Morita is available for a pivotal role. But on the whole, the busload of name supporting players and cameos proves just too much, especially Tim Blake Nelson as Broderick's psychotic estranged brother, as well as an awful Calista Flockhart as his even crazier girlfriend, who in one scene holds a Pomeranian at knifepoint. In his first time out, Nathanson tries for a blockbuster Hollywood comedy, but when a large scale combines with a desperate eagerness to please, it's hard for anyone to relax enough to enjoy it.