Melville and Patricia Irving and Christopher Thompson story by David H. FOREIGN MATTER - JUMPIN' JACK FLASH, directed by Penny Miss Goldberg is only funny when she is being foul-mouthed, which seems rude since no one else is allowed to respond in kind or degree.Īmong those who behave themselves best as members of the supporting cast are Stephen Collins, Carol Kane, John Wood, Jim Belushi and Jonathan Pryce. Even potentially good gags somehow go unrealized, as when Miss Goldberg manages to get the skirt of a blue-beaded evening dress caught in a paper shredder. Miss Marshall directs ''Jumpin' Jack Flash'' as if she were more worried about the decor than the effect of the performance. This is something that might have been prevented by the director, Penny Marshall, the star of television's ''Laverne and Shirley'' who here makes her debut as a theatrical film director. Spielberg apotheosized her, often treats her cruelly. She's an exuberant, R-rated presence imprisoned within essentially genteel, G-rated circumstances.Īs she seems to be inhibited by her obligations to the narrative - or what there is of it - she is made to look even sillier by her presence in it. Miss Goldberg, dressed in her own variation of Annie Hall chic, her dreadlocks bouncing, struts through the film like a visitor from outer space, doing an occasional shtick and frequently uttering her favorite seven-letter word. However it was put together, ''Jumpin' Jack Flash'' succeeds neither as a Whoopi Goldberg vehicle nor as a conventional comedy. This sort of thing sometimes works, as in Eddie Murphy's triumph in the ''Beverly Hills Cop'' project originally intended for Sylvester Stallone. ''Jumpin' Jack Flash'' appears to have been written to be played by almost any conventional, halfway competent actress, and then hastily remodeled in an attempt to fit the particular Whoopi Goldberg image. Watching Miss Goldberg attempt to scale herself down to the demands of this desperate endeavor is to see the triumph of compromise as the terminal disease of show business.
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The movie opens today at the RKO National Twin and other theaters. She's a volatile natural resource that can't easily be contained by means as frail and soft-headed as those offered by ''Jumpin' Jack Flash,'' her first and - let's hope - her worst motion-picture comedy. Miss Goldberg is both an actress and a performer.
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Under the supervision of Mike Nichols, and with a minimum of props, she created a series of sharp, naive, worldly, lost, always eccentric characters, as well as the worlds they inhabited. In her earlier, one-woman Broadway show, ''Whoopi Goldberg,'' and especially in its beautifully edited, somewhat reworked adaptation for Home Box Office, she'd been even better. AS she demonstrated in Steven Spielberg's ''Color Purple,'' in which she gave a good, disciplined performance in a production that could otherwise have used some of her restraint, Whoopi Goldberg is a legitimate actress -one capable of submerging her own personality in the interests of a particular characterization.