A Fish Called Wanda - 1988
Rating - 15
Director - Charles Chrichton
Written By - John Cleese
Starring - John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline
Run time - 108 minutes
A Fish Called Wanda is a 1988 comedy heist about a group of thieves who attempt to steal a large amount of diamonds while betraying and framing each other at the same time. The film stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Wanda Gershwitz, a american con artist, who along with London gangster George Thomason (Tom Georgeson), ignorant weirdo Otto West (Kline) and animal lover and stutter sufferer Ken Pile (Palin), who together steal a sum of diamonds worth millions and hide them in a secret garage under lock and key. Though when secret lovers Wanda and Otto go to steal them for themselves, they have been removed and hidden by George. So they secretly phone the police on him on which he gets arrested and imprisoned. While Wanda is visiting George, she meets his lawyer, Archie Leach (Cleese) and attempts to seduce him into letting her know where the loot is.
Throughout the movie, there are lots of action and funny scenes while also having a smooth running and smartly written script. I especially enjoyed Kevin Kline’s performance as Otto and made the character so weirdly but comedically perfect. So great in fact, that Kline won an oscar for best supporting actor for this movie. Another great performance in this movie was from Michael Palin as Ken, who originally received a large amount of backlash for his character having a stutter and for the film apparently mocking sufferers of the disorder, though the reason that the character did was because Palin’s father had had one all his life and he wanted to spread awareness to the struggles people have to go through when living with it. John Cleese won the BAFTA for best actor while Michael Palin won best supporting actor and Jamie Lee Curtis won best actress.
A Fish Called Wanda is one of my favourite british movies, even being ranked no.39 on the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest british films of the 20th century. The cast did reunite for the 1997 movie Fierce Creatures which is not particularly a sequel to the movie as the main cast play different roles, but it was not as well received as this movie and was also a box office flop. Though I do enjoy both movies, I would definitely recommend A Fish Called Wanda way higher because of its superiority to the latter.
Score - 9/10
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