Director: Jim Kouf
Cast: Tom Conti, Teri Garr, Paul Rodriguez

When it comes to movies that are comedies, the makers of these comedies have a long of range as to what comic formula they can follow to make a story that will hopefully make audiences laugh so hard, the audiences will want to repeat the experience. Which of course will result in the movie's producers making so much money that it isn't funny. One possible route to follow is to spoof something familiar to audiences that seeing the familiar something made fun of will give it some freshness as well as pointing out elements of the story that audiences may have found tiring in previous serious treatments. Another possibility is to make a slapstick exercise, a particular subgenre of comedy that has proven to be extremely popular for decades not only on these shores, but in seemingly every other country in the world. But another popular premise for both domestic and foreign comedies is to make a "buddy" comedy. In other words, pairing up two people - usually very different from each other - and in the process let them interact together and deal with various obstacles together while each keeping their distinct personality. I think that the "buddy" comedy has been so successful for years is that these movies tend to ultimately be assuring. They will tell everyone in the audience that even if they think their personality is one that could never mesh with a much different personality coming from another person, with enough work and discussion, both they and the other party will eventually come to a compromise. Also, the fact that opposite personalities can often clash at first can possibly make for some very funny sequences.

There have been many different kinds of "buddy" comedies made over the years. One is to pair people from completely different cultures and ethnic groups, such as what happened in the three Rush Hour movies. Other "buddy" comedies use people from the same cultures and ethnic groups, but have a completely different viewpoint - take the grumpy and curt Bud Spencer and the breezy and fun-loving Terence Hill in the comedies they made together such as Crime Busters. However, I have noticed one particular kind of "buddy" team up that has been used significantly less than many other kinds of comic team ups, and that happens to be involving a man and a woman who are divorced or have a very rocky marriage. Either way, they are very hostile towards each other, but circumstances force them to be together. That can indeed make for some very funny stuff. For instance, the 1989 divorce comedy The War Of The Roses was pretty funny, my favorite scene being the one involving fish for dinner. And it was pretty successful at the box office, being the thirteenth highest grossing movie of the year. However, when you look back at the motion picture industry for the past several decades, you will see that there haven't been a great amount of comedies made involving a man and a woman with some kind of hostile relationship but find themselves having to stick with each other. Why is that? Well, I think one reason is that a great number of adults in the world have had to deal with one or more relationships with a romantic partner that came to a bitter end. Because of this, they probably don't think they can relate to a cinematic version that seemingly tries to make light of such a hardship.

Another reason why I think that not many comedies have been made with people broken up or on the verge of breaking up is that inevitably the two people in the cinematic couple for much of the running time act very hostile towards each other. It creates a bitter edge, so much so that it then can be hard for the writers, actors, and directors of these movies to generate laughs. A third reason is what tends to happen to the characters as the comedy progresses. Almost always, the feuding duo start to warm up to each other, so much so that at the end of the movie they are fully in love again - and seemingly forgetful of all the issues that started them to feud in the first place. Even for comedies, that kind of thing is often hard to believe. This reason, plus the two others I discussed before, are reasons why it's hard most of the time for me to buy "buddy" movies with hostile couples. But it can work on occasion, I admit, so when I got my hands on a copy of Miracles, I was willing to give it a chance. Especially since it was also an unknown movie. The couple that are feuding in this particular movie are a surgeon named Roger (Tom Conti, Derailed), and a woman named Jean (Teri Garr, Firstborn). At the start of the movie, they have recently divorced, and are trying not to think of each other. But circumstances suddenly thrust them together again when a robber named Juan (Paul Rodriguez, D.C. Cab), fleeing from a failed robbery, causes a big car accident that both Roger and Jean find themselves in. Juan then takes Roger and Jean hostage, forcing them to drive him away. Naturally, Roger and Jean don't take being with each other again very well, but they don't get a huge amount of time to chat because due to circumstances beyond their control, the police start to think they are in cahoots with Juan. Eventually Juan and the feuding couple meet up with Juan's partner Harry (Christopher Lloyd, Interstate 60), and all four board Harry's airplane and fly to Mexico. Once over Mexico, Juan and Harry bail out of the plane when it starts to malfunction, leaving Roger and Jean stuck together alone. While they manage to escape from being killed when the plane crashes, they then have to deal with getting out of the Mexican desert alive, the Mexican police, and various other wacky situations.

Although a production by a major Hollywood studio (Orion Pictures), Miracles doesn't have seem to received much of a push either during its theatrical run or subsequently by any other distributor that managed to get its hands on it. It would have been a miracle if it had, considering the less than stellar end results. The problems with this movie started even before filming began, namely with the miscasting. To begin with, actor Tom Conti simply doesn't come across as leading man material from his performance here. Although he is sometimes passable when things momentarily quiet down, when he is made to take command or co-demand of a big scene, he is hopeless. He might have been okay as a lightly sarcastic secondary character, but as a lead he has no comic timing or seemingly any idea of how to be both comedic and likable. His approach instead is to be brash and broad, instead of amusingly human, and he ends up being extremely irritating. Equally broad is actor Christopher Lloyd, who did this movie around the same time as Back To The Future but either forgot what he learned from that movie, or hadn't learned how to play lovably goofy at that point in his career. As for Terri Garr and Paul Rodriguez, come to think of it, with them you can actually see that they might have been able to pull off their roles under better circumstances. From looking at their performances, they seem to be performing a long way from their best judgement, with Rodriguez being forced to dig up Hispanic stereotypes that were even offensive for this time period, and Garr made to avoid putting enough heart into her character to make us interested enough to see how she will end up.

With both Conti and Garr giving dead-on-arrival performances, you can probably guess that when it comes to chemistry - romantic or comic - when they are paired together in a scene, it's already in rigor mortis. It is quite an ordeal to hear them argue (which is a lot), and when they soften up, it just seems phony. I'll admit, however, that any actor in one of those particular roles would have a really tough time contributing towards making the movie work... or in any of the other roles in the movie for that matter. Writer/director Jim Kouf (Disorganized Crime) makes the fatal mistake of making all of the characters not only annoying, but annoyingly stupid. Sure, stupid movie characters can be funny, but you can't make them just stupid - the audience has to find something to like about them, such as good intentions. The characters in Miracles are so stupid that I couldn't identify or sympathize with any of them. I got angry at them instead, so I wasn't laughing at all. To tell the truth, the most I found amusing in the movie were a couple of half-hearted one-liners, and that's it. The other attempts at humor fail for a whole range of reasons, not only because the characters are irritating or fall into hopeless stereotypes (you can guess how the Mexican police come across), but also because practically all of the humor is incredibly predictable, even if a particular gag happens to be one that hasn't been rehashed endlessly in other movies. From this movie, it's written and directed in a manner that comes across as someone who grew up in a humorless and repressed culture like North Korea, and then was only exposed to one (mediocre) American comedy movie before being ordered to make one of his own. Jokes about attempted rape, the use of wacky music, and a usually mean-spirited undertone are just some of the dampers that make it impossible to laugh at just about anything.

Writer/director Kouf not only has no comic timing or understanding, from Miracles it seems he doesn't have much in the way of basic movie making skills. The movie is badly photographed, the night sequences barely have any lighting, continuity errors are frequent, and this PG-rated movie in some spots has clearly been overdubbed with new dialogue, possibly to bring the movie down from a PG-13 or R status. The core story also has its share of questionable touches, like how the predictable thread of the estranged couple falling back in love is not the least bit convincing, let alone the fact that these two lead characters aren't together in the climactic sequence. However, there is one plot element of Miracles that did interest me a little, and that was the movie's view of God and the interesting ways He can bring miracles. Throughout the movie there are a lot of little touches that suggest how God has everything going for some kind of ultimate purpose, seeing how the characters interact directly or indirectly that makes some kind of sense at the very end of everything, even if it's not how we would personally direct these people. It's not just characters praying, or declaring "Thank God" when a problem has passed, but subtle stuff like a sidewalk bench with "Repent" written on it, or how the character of Roger is presented in the scene where he wakes up on a beach. It's never heavy-handed, and people from any particular faith will find it palatable and not clashing with their own beliefs, whatever these beliefs may be. Which is good, because anyone from anywhere will find that looking for these small touches momentarily distracts them from the utter pain of watching all the other stuff in Miracles.

(Posted June 27, 2025)