I imagine that the "pitch" went something like this:
"Ok, we have the star, Dana Carvey, who's hot right now. He's a funny man. He's going to play a detective who watches The Maltese Falcon on the tv and thinks he's Humphrey Bogart. And there's a coin that's worth seven million dollars and a bunch of guys are after it. But here's the gimmick. Carvey has amnesia and he doesn't know that he has the coin. And then the real kicker — not only does he have amnesia, but he has a kind of amnesia that starts over every time he goes to sleep, so he doesn't even know what he did yesterday.. Ain't that terrific?"
Well, it must have been terrific, because someone decided to put some money into the film, and someone managed to persuade James Earl Jones and Michael Gambon to take supporting roles in this bird-brained turkey.
Did anyone say, "Does amnesia work that way? Is there a kind of amnesia that begins again every morning."
If they did, I know what the answer would have been. "Who cares? This is not real amnesia, it's movie amnesia" –which is, once again, the most malleable of maladies.
So here's a new genre, the amnesiac-gumshoe farce. A small, unpromising genre.
It's an unfunny movie that hovers between D (for dumb) minus and F (phony). I doubt anyone's ever heard of it, except for hardcore amnesia fans. And even they were disappointed.
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