It's hard to fathom how &/or why so many otherwise savvy film folks got involved with this dumb vulgar travesty. The quick & easy answer is probably most (e.g. Billy Crystal & Cloris Leachman) only had brief cameos & never saw the entire script.
The trivia notes to the movie state that one team wrote the plot & another the jokes. I don't know who did a worse job. Plotwise, among other things it was never made clear why the Harmony character was doing community service nor why (or even if) she "fell" for the Jackie character. Hard to believe in any case.
Although he was funny the Scorsese's King of Comedy & even, arguably, in Taxi Driver, Robert Deniro is not a natural comedian. His humor seems gratuitously cruel & cynical here, especially at the wedding & the retirement home, partly due to the gross teenage humor level of the material but also in large part to Deniro's wholly unsympathetic performance. It would have worked had the film's creators been able to resurrect Rodney Dangerfield for the role. In fact the whole movie seemed to be based on Dangerfield's career, although he was never as cruel nor as much of a loser as Jackie.
Also in the trivia notes it says that Deniro tried to get this film made for 8 years. One wonders if the final result is what he foresaw.
The trivia notes to the movie state that one team wrote the plot & another the jokes. I don't know who did a worse job. Plotwise, among other things it was never made clear why the Harmony character was doing community service nor why (or even if) she "fell" for the Jackie character. Hard to believe in any case.
Although he was funny the Scorsese's King of Comedy & even, arguably, in Taxi Driver, Robert Deniro is not a natural comedian. His humor seems gratuitously cruel & cynical here, especially at the wedding & the retirement home, partly due to the gross teenage humor level of the material but also in large part to Deniro's wholly unsympathetic performance. It would have worked had the film's creators been able to resurrect Rodney Dangerfield for the role. In fact the whole movie seemed to be based on Dangerfield's career, although he was never as cruel nor as much of a loser as Jackie.
Also in the trivia notes it says that Deniro tried to get this film made for 8 years. One wonders if the final result is what he foresaw.