"Quick Change" director Howard Franklin and comedian Bill Murray have literally got a white elephant on their hands in the highly forgettable juvenile critter comedy "Larger than Life," co-starring Matthew McConaughey, Janeane Garofalo, Pat Hingle, Jeremy Piven, and Linda Fiorentino. Murray plays a motivational speaker who finds himself saddled with Velma, a female elephant that belonged to his recently deceased circus clown father whom he never met. When mom and pop went their separate ways, mom got Murray and pop kept the pachyderm. Now, pop's attorney (Harve Presnell of "Fargo") wants $35-thousand to cover the damages that Tarzan's best friend has chomped up while he waited on our hero to claim his inheritance.
The only way that Jack Corcoran (Bill Murray of "Ghostbusters") can get off the tusk is to take the animal across country to a zoo, specifically to Mo (Janeane Garofalo) who is willing to buy Velma as part of a breeding experiment in India. This is Jack's first option. The second option, he learns, is a sexy animal trainer who is prepared to up the ante for Velma. The dilemma that Jack faces is who to sell the beast to, either the sympathetic but homely zoo keeper (Garofalo had a similar role in "The Truth about Cats and Dogs") or temptress animal trainer Terry Bonura (Linda Fiorentino), who uses electric prods to make her beasties behave.
Getting the elephant there comprises the bulk of Roy Blount, Jr's lackluster, lead-footed plot. You could grow as old and wrinkled as an elephant waiting for an original laugh here. Jack and Velma travel by train, truck, and on foot, but they encounter trouble around every bend. Along the way, Jack tricks a paranoid, speed-freak truckers, Tip Tucker (Matthew McConaughey of "Dazed and Confused") into giving them a lift. When Tip learns that Jack has duped him, he raises a posse of state troopers who follow in hot pursuit, Jack blunders off the interstate and heads into the desert. Velma and he save an antique Spanish church from a flood. The grateful villagers idolize the elephant and helps Jack finish his cross-country jaunt.
Film purists will have reason to complain. At one point, Jck dons the outfits that John Wayne wore in John Ford's 1949 classic "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" to elude Tucker. The filmmakers back up this costume change as Jack sticks to the back trails with Elmer Bernstein's classic "Magnificent Seven" theme. Talk about mixing movie metaphors! If you cannot figure out the ending, perhaps you should treat yourself to this shoddy farce that stretches its unlikely partners premises far beyond the breaking point. Either Bill Murray desperately want to produce a flop movie for tax purposes or he needed to return as a regular to NBC-TV's "Saturday Night Live."
The only way that Jack Corcoran (Bill Murray of "Ghostbusters") can get off the tusk is to take the animal across country to a zoo, specifically to Mo (Janeane Garofalo) who is willing to buy Velma as part of a breeding experiment in India. This is Jack's first option. The second option, he learns, is a sexy animal trainer who is prepared to up the ante for Velma. The dilemma that Jack faces is who to sell the beast to, either the sympathetic but homely zoo keeper (Garofalo had a similar role in "The Truth about Cats and Dogs") or temptress animal trainer Terry Bonura (Linda Fiorentino), who uses electric prods to make her beasties behave.
Getting the elephant there comprises the bulk of Roy Blount, Jr's lackluster, lead-footed plot. You could grow as old and wrinkled as an elephant waiting for an original laugh here. Jack and Velma travel by train, truck, and on foot, but they encounter trouble around every bend. Along the way, Jack tricks a paranoid, speed-freak truckers, Tip Tucker (Matthew McConaughey of "Dazed and Confused") into giving them a lift. When Tip learns that Jack has duped him, he raises a posse of state troopers who follow in hot pursuit, Jack blunders off the interstate and heads into the desert. Velma and he save an antique Spanish church from a flood. The grateful villagers idolize the elephant and helps Jack finish his cross-country jaunt.
Film purists will have reason to complain. At one point, Jck dons the outfits that John Wayne wore in John Ford's 1949 classic "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" to elude Tucker. The filmmakers back up this costume change as Jack sticks to the back trails with Elmer Bernstein's classic "Magnificent Seven" theme. Talk about mixing movie metaphors! If you cannot figure out the ending, perhaps you should treat yourself to this shoddy farce that stretches its unlikely partners premises far beyond the breaking point. Either Bill Murray desperately want to produce a flop movie for tax purposes or he needed to return as a regular to NBC-TV's "Saturday Night Live."