Leonard Part 6
Bill Cosby is an
excellent comedian. His stand-up show Himself is brilliant, and shows such an
assured comedian that he spends much of it sitting down, a move that many
stand-up comedians would never do. After years of being a guest star on other
peoples shows, he became one of the most loved TV stars playing Cliff Huxtable
in The Cosby Show which ran for 8 years between 1984 and 1992. In fact he’s
still performing stand-up shows now at the age of 76. So how did it come to pass
that in 1987, as he was so successful elsewhere, that he was the lead in
Leonard Part 6? A film that he was so ashamed of, that he publically told
audiences not to waste their money watching it. Was he over-reacting? Let’s
find out…
Leonard part 6 (you haven’t missed parts 1-5, that’s supposed to be a
joke which is explained at the beginning of the movie), centres around a spy (Leonard
– played by Bill Cosby) who is forced out of retirement when an evil vegetarian,
Medusa Johnson (Gloria Foster) tries to take over the world with animals that
have been trained to attack humans. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. Even Kids
Say the Darndest Things had more of a coherent narrative. In fact I think that
this film may have been written in crayon on a kindergarten wall by some of the
future stars of that show.
But it wasn’t just the
script that seems to have been written by a bunch of six year olds, no it seems
they designed the opening credits too. When a movie starts with a bunch of
poorly drawn animals plastered over the credits then you can pretty much guess
what level the film is going to be at. It actually looks like it’s going to be
a movie that was a junior school project. Hardly the image that any
professional movie maker wants to project I’m sure. Maybe it was a prototype
for Cosby’s next project: Kids Design the Crappiest Things.
Then the movie starts.
For some reason it starts with an amalgamation of scenes that are quite near
the end of the film. Bill Cosby, jumping a tank off the top of a road, Bill
Cosby ballet dancing and Bill Cosby jumping off of a roof riding an ostrich
(unfortunately it was a “real” ostrich, and not a Bernie Clifton style ostrich
costume). Now I can see why they did this: The movie is so dull that starting
it with something wacky may hold the audience in place just to see how Cosby
got into such a crazy situations, but maybe if somebody just pointed out that
holding an audience’s attention is much more easily done by making a movie that
doesn’t make The Only Way is Essex look like it was written by Shakespeare.
As I’ve already mentioned,
the plot is spread so thinly it could be mistaken for the sandwich filling in a
motorway service station café. It’s only a few minutes before you’re introduced
to Medusa Johnson’s plan, when a rainbow trout is shown a picture of a CIA
agent he wants assassinated, and like the last vindictive fish we saw, the
shark in Jaws: The Revenge, this trout barks (it also pauses to look at a
discarded copy of Playboy, which raises all sorts of questions that I’m not
sure I want answered…). I know this is a family film, so I can understand the
bloodless death, and the use of something silly like a rainbow trout over
something that may be scary like a piranha, but I can’t overlook the fact that
even the child that sits in class eating glue would realise the size difference
between a man and a single trout. Maybe a shoal of trout attacking him could
have worked, but nobody involved in this movie seemed to credit children with
any intelligence.
The movie continues in
its stupidity from there. A man is killed by a bunch of frogs gathering under
his car and hopping it into the river, Leonard spends four minutes choosing a
tie (I’m not kidding), Leonard gets some ballet shoes and a queen bee from
Nurse Carvalho (Anna Levine), a fortune teller he doesn’t understand, which are
soon used in a fight/dance-off seemingly against the cast of The Lion King
Musical, and then to empty a room of bees that were guarding something or other
(yeah I really wasn’t paying attention at this point). Eventually the stupidity
culminates in a battle between Leonard and Medusa’s vegetarians which includes
Medusa’s head henchman, Man Ray’s (David Maier) head exploding as he meat for
the first time (now I’ve had a dodgy hot dog or two in my lifetime, but it was
never my head that eventually exploded…).
I think there’s maybe
one thing we can all take from this movie, and that’s not to trust Morrissey. This
movie really is like an anti-vegetarian propaganda film. It’s actually worse
than the short movie “The Meat Council Presents Meat
and You: Partners in Patriotism” from the classic Simpsons episode Lisa the
Vegetarian. The message in this film seems to be that veggies are both evil,
and that they can’t handle the taste explosion that is a hot dog (for the
record, I do actually eat meat and my blood type is probably gravy. But I still
think this is a crappy message to be sending out to the audience).
The acting, whilst not brilliant, is
standard for most low budget family films of the time and whilst the costumes
and sets look crappy, again this is pretty much what you’d expect from any
similar film from the time. The fact that this movie is so dumb and yet so
boring at the same time really is the only major problem with this film. Bill
Cosby not only starred, but co-wrote it too, so most of the blame should rest
with him. He obviously didn’t have the ability to write outside of what he
knew. His comedy was always based around family life and trying to write a spy
comedy just didn’t suit him.
As a movie it’s just a confused mess that
wastes the talent and charisma of Cosby, but then again that could pretty much
describe any film that he starred in. Cosby was better off on TV, or sitting on
a stage telling jokes, but he seemed to be determined to try and conquer the
movie world too. When Leonard Part 6, and later Ghost Dad were the results, you
wonder why he bothered. I really can’t recommend this movie on any level, it
really is an absolute joke. Which is funny really as jokes are exactly what
Cosby forgot to include.
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