Hill: Brewster's Millions (1985)

Brewster’s Millions was the seventh film version of George Barr McCutcheon’s 1902 fairy tale, although the story is pretty much unchanged: Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor) stands to inherit three hundred million dollars from an obscure, eccentric relative if he can spend thirty million dollars in thirty days without acquiring any assets, and without telling his best friend Spike Nolan (John Candy) about the plan. When McCutcheon wrote his novel, that was quite a significant feat, but part of the joke of Walter Hill’s adaptation is that it’s par for the course in the 80s, the most sensible and sober way to invest in a market in which the future has become the prime commodity. To that end, Hill expends and disposes of tone, character and atmosphere in much the same way as Brewster does his millions, refusing to treat them as assets or to concede that they could form part of his film in any permanent or enduring way. As a result, the film is driven by kinetic, elastic intensities more than anything else, the sheer spectacle of investing money across huge masses of people and products, much closer in spirit to an action film than a comedy, and so quick to turn Brewster and Nolan into celebrities that it doesn’t really leave any room for them as characters. Perhaps that’s why it feels more like an extended montage sequence than a fully-fledged film  – or at least makes you realise how efficiently the 80s montage sequence functioned as a record of expenditure, an itemised receipt of cinematic pleasure, proof you’d got your money’s worth. If going to the movies is about the only thing Brewster doesn’t do to waste his money, then it’s only because Hill’s idea of the movies is diversified enough to make it feel as if his direction is also a matter of overhiring, overtipping, overpaying, overgambling, sponsoring extravagant spectacles, ruining rare stamps by putting them back into circulation, chasing ambulance chasers, committing libel, getting sued, endorsing himself for positions he never intends to fill and, finally, decorating everything with a “postmodern fantasy” that blends “Busby Berkeley and Mesopotamia.” And yet, like Brewster, he only appears to be wasting time, only appears to be making bad investments, setting his sights on dividends that exceed any single outlay or payoff in the film, which ends up exceeding the sum of its parts in the strangest, slyest, most inexplicable way.