Every Which Way But Loose + Any Which Way You Can

Somehow I didn't expect a comedy starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan to be quite this absurdist.

I thought it sounded like a fairly reasonable premise, but evidently the writer* felt he had been given license to embrace the Buñuel school of plotless non sequitur. At times like a laconic Blues Brothers, complete with country western bar brawl, ticked off lawmen and California Nazis, this little joke is a tad more sophisticated than its Landis/Ramis/Reitman contemporaries. To wit, most every sequence is played straight, as if from a perfectly sensible movie. But they add up to less and less and somewhere between the point when Clint randomly terrorizes a snotty coed and the irrelevent reel during which Clint relentlessly terrorizes some nimrod bikers (culminating in the sublime moment when Clyde drives a street sweeper off a produce loading dock) one starts to suspect that the joke is on you and your expectations of Dirty Harry Callahan. This is more successful self-parody than when, say, Arnold got pregnant.


* The IMDb entry on writer Jeremy Joe Kronsberg includes this succinct bio: "Often referred to as the godfather of the modern ape chase movie."