Quick Change

By VARIETY STAFF

Warner/Devoted. Director Howard Franklin, Bill Murray; Producer Robert Greenhut, Bill Murray; Screenplay Howard Franklin; Camera Michael Chapman; Editor Alan Heim; Music Randy Edelman, Howard Shore; Art Director David Gropman
 
Bill Murray
Geena Davis
Randy Quaid
Jason Robards
Bob Elliott
Philip Bosco
 

Bill Murray delivers a smart, sardonic and very funny valentine to the rotten Apple in Quick Change. Pic became Murray's directing debut (he shares the chores with screenwriter Howard Franklin) after he and Franklin became too attached to the project to bring anyone else in. Material, based on Jay Cronley's book, is neither ambitious nor particularly memorable, but it's brought off with a sly flair that makes it most enjoyable.

Murray plays a fed-up New Yorker who enlists his girlfriend (Geena Davis) and lifelong pal (Randy Quaid) in a bank heist so they can get outta town. Hold-up, which nets $1 million and a very nice watch, sets off a carnival of police and crowd reaction in the New York streets, but none of it flaps the dynamite-rigged Murray.

With Jason Robards as a crusty police inspector who's as crazily sharp as Twin Peaks agent Cooper, pic offers some crazy little setpieces in a manic game of chase. Pic is so thick with gritty, tired, scuzzy NY atmosphere viewer wants to scrape it off the skin.

Only in the final reel do things feel broadly contrived, concurrent with pic's move from NY locations to a Florida soundstage for airport shooting.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1990. Running time: 88 MIN.