Ruthless People (1986)

Starring: Danny DeVito, Judge Reinhold, Helen Slater, Bette Midler, Anita Morris, and Bill Pullman 
Grade: Classic

Captained by Danny DeVito in one of his all-time best performances, Ruthless People is the benchmark for what black comedies should be.

Summary

While with his mistress Carol (Morris) at a restaurant, Beverly Hills fashion tycoon Sam Stone (DeVito) tells her how he married his wife Barbara (Midler) because her father was rich and was about to die. Once they pulled the plug though, he managed to stabilize and live for another fifteen years. This forced Sam to build up his fortune. Now, Barbara’s father has finally died of natural causes, and Sam wants all of the man’s money. Seeing that he’s with Carol, we know his marriage with Barbara was purely for financial gain. In fact, he hates the annoying Barbara and plans on killing her to get the rest of the money. Carol can’t wait because being with him, she’ll get a portion of the fortune too. Sam happily goes home with his bottle of chloroform, ready to throw her unconscious body off a cliff. However, he doesn’t find anyone there. Soon after, he gets a phone call. Apparently, Barbara has been kidnapped by poor couple Ken (Reinhold) and Sandy Kessler (Slater). They demand a briefcase, $500,000, and for Sam to appear case-in-hand on Monday morning to Hope Street Plaza to answer a phone to await further instruction. He will be watched and if he gets any help or does anything that deviates from the plan, Barbara will be killed. If he notifies the police or the media, Barbara will be killed. Since this is exactly what Sam wanted anyway, he notifies the police and the media immediately and celebrates the death of his wife privately in his home!

At the same time, Ken and Sandy throw Barbara into their basement and tie her up. As she yells at them and tells the couple that Sam will do anything to get her back, we transition to Sam at the house drinking champagne.

Back at the Kessler home, we see Ken and Sandy freak out that the story is on every news channel and how Sam called their bluff. Sandy starts to feel guilty, but Ken reminds her that Sam stole their money, stole Sandy’s fashion ideas (the spandex miniskirt), cut them out of it, and made a million dollars over it. Technically, Barbara was his partner, so Ken doesn’t feel guilty. He gave up his life savings on a handshake deal and got screwed! Elsewhere, we see Carol is treating Sam as her sidepiece. She’s actually dating Earl (Pullman). In bed, she reminds Earl he’s to film Sam at a deserted bridge near the Hollywood sign where Sam was to dispose of Barbara’s body. Once they get this videotape, Carol intends on blackmailing Sam into setting her and Earl up for the rest of their lives.

The police investigate the house of Sam and find a chloroform-soaked handkerchief in the garbage, a tire print on the lawn, and blood in the kitchen. They want to meet with Sam to talk about things, so Sam puts in some eye drops to make it look like he’s been crying beforehand. Meanwhile, Earl has his video camera set up at the site but since he has no idea what Sam looks like, he films some fat guy banging a hooker. Since the woman is screaming, he assumes this “Sam” is killing her now and vomits watching it. Back at Sam’s place, Sam lies to the cops when they question things. Earl gets back to Carol and talks about how he watched what he thought was Sam “killing” this woman. This is when Carol mentions the ransom stuff she saw on television but passes it off as Sam’s alibi. She starts to watch the tape but when thinking about the grizzly details Earl described and hearing the screams on the tape, she immediately turns it off. Just then, Sam shows up at Carol’s, so she has Earl hide. Sam tells her what happened and says they’re in the clear. All he has to do is show up to the ransom drop. After celebrating with some champagne with a visibly frightened Carol (who still thinks he brutally murdered Barbara), he leaves to go back to his place to talk with the police some more.

Back at the Kessler home, Barbara notices her shackle to the bed is around the bottom post, so she lifts the bed slightly and frees herself. As Ken consoles Sandy in the living room, Barbara makes a run for it. Ken traps her in the kitchen with a gun and has Sandy bring the chloroform-soaked napkin. Barbara scares Sandy, so she drops the napkin. Ken picks it up, so Barbara hits him with a coffee cup. Instinctively, he touches his face with the napkin and drops the gun on her foot. She picks it up, but it turns out it’s only a lighter. However, she slips and falls, and Ken uses the napkin on her to knock her back out.

Crisis averted.

As the police lab investigate some tire purchases, we see Barbara watching television back in the basement, and she hears about a serial killer in town named “The Bedroom Killer” who’s at large and dangerous. She turns the channel to a workout show, and it inspires her to work out a little bit as she waits in her prison of sorts. In the kitchen, Sandy worryingly asks Ken the possibility of Sam not showing up to the drop site for the ransom, but he insists everything is going to work out.

They do not know how ruthless Sam Stone is.

My Thoughts:

Ruthless People doesn’t get mentioned nearly enough as it should as one of the best films coming out of the 1980s.

Coming from the filmmaking team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (the guys that gave us movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!), we get a dark comedy consisting of bad people doing even crazier things. Honestly, everything works, even though it shouldn’t on the level it does. Ruthless People is fantastic, but it’s not just because of how funny the movie is. It’s as good as it is because of how eventful, interesting, and unpredictable the narrative is. It has to be one of my favorite screenplays ever. It’s certainly one of the more underrated ones I’ve seen put to film. Never have I seen a story so active. There’s so much going on! There are so many different perspectives to look at and when you blend it with the many twists and turns involving the characters, you get when one of the most momentous and unstable comedies you’ll see coming out of this decade. Despite the plot we’re dealing with and so many mean-spirited characters being involved while almost all of them having worse intentions than the last, the film succeeds at every level.

There are six principal characters we’re dealing with. However, we see how sharp the screenplay is right away. Each character, no matter how big their role is, gets introduced in the right way at the right time. Each arc makes sense, and it gets funnier as we get to know each person. Now as the viewer, we know the real personalities and motivations for each character involved, but to the other characters, they all think each other’s traits are completely different. To us, Ken and Sandy are good people even though they’re behind the kidnapping. I don’t know if it’s because we know the good natured and innocent faces of Helen Slater and perpetual goofball Judge Reinhold, but it’s impossible to hate them. We know they got screwed by Sam. The young couple do genuinely feel bad about what they’re doing, even Ken (though he tries to avoid admitting it like Sandy does). They’re not vicious or “ruthless” people. The two just got their lives ruined and want what’s owed to them. It’s hard not to take their side despite the malicious act they’re performing on paper.

Once the plot gets going, we start to notice all the aforementioned twisted perspectives everyone has of each other and how they’ve all been connected because of Sam. To Barbara, Ken and Sandy are evil kidnappers. To Sam, they’re incompetent kidnappers. To us, Sam is a bad man but to the cops, the media, and Barbara, he’s a saint. To Carol, he’s a target for money. To Earl, he’s a crazy murderer. They all have their own twisted character arcs and have their own beliefs of what’s going on based off of crazy misunderstandings that have gone too far, and it’s handled so well, I honestly didn’t know what was coming next.

This is a movie to watch if you’re writing a screenplay, and you’re suffering from writer’s block. They take this story down so many different avenues, it shows you how you can take a simple premise such as a kidnapping of a wealthy man’s wife and how it can go virtually anywhere in a realistic sense while being consistently entertaining. There are very few movies I would put in this small list of writer’s block movies, but Ruthless People is 100% on it.

We may be dealing with loads of bad people, hence the title, but what’s impressive is that it’s so well written we don’t just want to turn it off. If it’s too mean-spirited, you’re always at risk of making this happening. This is why black comedies are so hard to do right. Thankfully, the actors are charismatic enough to not only make sure this screenplay is brought to life to the level it deserves, but the material is also elevated because of their performances. You want to see how things turn out for everyone involved. This even includes Danny DeVito’s Sam. The film opens with him talking with his mistress about killing his wife to establish him as the villain, but even though his intentions couldn’t be eviler, his portrayal of Sam is so entertaining you want to see how things will fare for him. In fact, some of the best parts of the movie is Sam doing reprehensible thing after reprehensible thing, but it’s just that funny. The always annoying Bette Midler tries her hardest for us to hate her (despite her being the victim) and almost succeeds, but they manage to make her likable later on because of her bond with Sandy and Ken.

Judge Reinhold’s performance as the lead kidnapper never gets to a point where I thought he should go to jail. He’s such a nice dude and gets all the best lines too. It’s crazy, right? I want the kidnappers to succeed! It’s not even because of Sam either, it’s because Ken and Sandy are such innocent souls you feel bad for them and want them to get something. They just don’t have it in them to be cutthroat. There’s a scene where Sandy explains to Ken, she thinks that Barbara doesn’t like her. Ken, delivered in classic Reinhold fashion tells her earnestly, “Sandy, you’re her kidnapper. She’s supposed to hate you!”. Hell, Ken can’t even lie to sell speakers to customers! At one point, as Ken talks about how ruthless they need to be to get ahead, he sees a spider in his house. Instead of killing it, he picks it up with a newspaper and lets it outside.

I can’t think of a better way to explain our protagonists.

As the nature of our kidnappers start to click in our heads during this scene, Ken realizes the irony in what he did compared to what he said, and he comes back outside and steps on the spider. This is a great foreshadowing of what is to come for their mission, or at least what they have to become to get things done. It’s a shame they’re dealing with a man who wants his wife dead. This whole thing is screwy, and it’s great.

Bill Pullman, a guy who is ten years away from playing the President of the United States in Independence Day, plays this laidback doofus who’s Carol’s boyfriend and he’s hilarious. The scene where he comes back to Carol to tell her about how he thought he saw “Sam” kill the woman in front of him (“It must’ve lasted two minutes”) but was basically just describing sex because he was too stupid to understand what was happening had me cackling. The man acted like he got back from war when he technically just saw a porno. When he shows up in the climax, the humor hit its apex. Despite having the smallest role of the six main actors, he still had his moment in the sun and shined in every opportunity given. It wouldn’t have been the same without him.

This has to be one of the most creative comedies I’ve ever seen. When you combine the blackmail of the chief and the inclusion of the serial killer, you can’t believe how many developments happen in one story and succeed. Honestly, I don’t want to go into further detail about the film because it would spoil one of the many exciting places the story takes itself. It’s hilarious too. They don’t force any jokes either. The comedy just comes naturally from a great cast, well-written characters, and colorful scenarios at every turn. Without blinking, I can say that Ruthless People should rank high on anyone’s list of greatest comedies ever.