By Geno McGahee
Tom Hanks gets a lot of credit for his acting ability, but that credit came far after 1989, when he was known for Bosom Buddies, mostly. He was a budding comedic star and it is common to team up an actor like this with an animal. So, we get TURNER AND HOOCH, a slobbering dog and Hanks together to fight crime.
Detective Scott Turner (Hanks) lives in a small town where nothing happens, but a local fish business is rumored to have some shady dealings going on. An old man and his dog Hooch are getting disturbed by strange noises and believe something criminal is occurring. When Turner finds the old man dead, he believes that the dog is the best witness and adopts him, more or less, and that’s when it gets really silly.
The focus on this film is how destructive a dog can be and how it could be terrible for a guy that is really touchy about his stuff. Turner is very uptight. So, when Hooch gets loose and ruins his property, he flips out and even gets his gun, but he does learn to love the dog and it gets disturbing as we watch him roll around in little black panties with the slobbering mutt. Shame on the cameraman that got that nut shot of Hanks. I have a rather big TV and they put that camera right under Hanks’s sack and those speedos left nothing to the imagination. You add a drooling dog and a bed, it starts implying that man’s best friend may be more than that.
Turner keeps finding drool (I think) in his shoes and everywhere else, which is an ongoing joke that they beat to death. I wonder who backstage thought it was so funny that Hooch drooled. “He’s drooling again! Tape it!” I could picture the director screaming that. Some people are easily amused.
At one point, Turner takes Hooch on a stakeout and starts imitating the dog…trying to see life from his perspective. The scene was just put in there to show some more hilarious moments of this man meets dog story. He is awoken by his new partner, Detective Sutton (Reginald VelJohnson). You may remember VelJohnson from DIE HARD as the twinkie-eating sidekick to Bruce Willis, but more of you may remember him as Carl Winslow from FAMILY MATTERS. The second that I saw him on the screen, I got nervous. Considering how they tried to force bad comedy down our throats here, I thought that he may have brought the laugh track that they used on his TV show.
One quick note about Sutton in this. In the very beginning, Turner is attacked by Hooch and Hooch has him by the jugular. What does Sutton do? He laughs and shakes his head with amusement. This is common with VelJohnson. In FAMILY MATTERS, he did nothing to stop Urkel from fucking his daughter, Laura. You remember that “Do the Urkel” dance? Well, if I was the father of Laura and he tried to stick his cock in her Urkel, I would beat his ass. VelJohnson just let him keep trying. Perhaps he had given up on life after realizing that he had to fuck Harriette…she was hideous. OK, I may have seen the show a couple of times.
Big props to Craig T. Nelson. He plays a (spoiler) crooked police chief. Nelson always delivers and does well here in the very small role that he’s in.
TURNER AND HOOCH is not a bad movie, but they really tried to force Hanks’s physical comedy attempts down our throats. I really think that they threw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what stuck and then elected to go with every single idea, good or bad, to pad the film. Hanks does well but he jumps into that whiney/yelling/wearing leave nothing to the imagination panties mode and it’s annoying.
In the end, I recommend this. Despite its flaws, it’s a fun family film, but those that scream about the acting chops of Hanks probably don’t talk about this one too much.
Rating: 6/10