John McNaughton directed this Richard Price-scripted comedy about a cop who learns to love an unwanted gift from a gangster. Robert De Niro plays Wayne Dobie, a shy and reclusive Chicago cop who has never fired a gun. Dobie is an evidence technician who takes photographs at crime scenes, earning the moniker of "Mad Dog" for his diffident attitude. One day Dobie walks in on a convenience store holdup and saves the life of Chicago mob boss Frank Milo (Bill Murray). Frank is impressed by the way
Dobie handled the holdup and wants to pay him back for saving his life. In thrall to Frank is Glory (Uma Thurman), who is working off her brother's gambling debts by living with the mobster. One day, Glory turns up at Dobie's house, explaining that Frank is giving her to him for one week as a gift. Initially Dobie wants nothing to do with Glory, but as the week goes on, he realizes he is becoming intensely attracted to her. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi
Throw Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman and Bill Murray together in a Universal Pictures movie and what do you get? Something that starts off at a beautiful clip before back-pedaling like crazy into a risk-free happy ending.
The film's main sin seems to be its indecision as to whether it is a black comedy, a satire, a thriller or a love story. It's none of the above. Just tedious.
An original if incoherent fable about the intricate relationships between a cop, a girl, and a gangster whose tone shifts radically from scene to scene, unable to reconcile between the story's softer love elements and its harder urban edges.
Milo: You love her? I own her! "A cop who'd rather be an artist. A mobster who'd rather be a comic. And a woman who'd rather be anywhere but between them."A lot of great people were at work in Mad Dog and Glory. Robert De Niro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman make up the all-star cast. John McNaughton, who directed Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer directed it and Martin Scorsese produced it. With all that talent I expected a much more lively and much funnier film. What I got was an enormous disappointment. There wasn't much I liked about it. I was even taken aback by the performances from De Niro and Murray. They aren't bad, but they don't seem as good as we know they are.A cop saves a mobster's life in a holdup. In order to pay the cop back for saving his life, the mobster gives him a girl that he owns. The girl and the cop fall in love and now they have to decide how to stay together and not have Milo go crazy and kill one or both of them. That plot just isn't all that interesting to me and it is even less interesting on screen then it is on paper. Mad Dog and Glory ended up being bland, and that is not something you expect when watching a Bill Murray or De Niro film. When I think about it McNaughton directed Henry... in sort of the same fashion. He made everything as dull as possible. In that movie it made sense though. This is supposed to be a comedy and should have been approached much differently. This pretty much shows why he faded away as a director and never really made anything as good or better than Henry.
December 5, 2011
Melvin White
Super Reviewer
People are never happy with where they are. You can always do more, even if you think you have what you want. It's never enough when you get there. For Wayne "Mad Dog" Dobie (Robert De Niro) the thought of a good retirement and health care as a police forensic photography, but he craves to be an artist. He craves to
have a girl. He craves to be a tough man, the American ideal like John Wayne. One night he stops by a convenience store and in his own way saves Frank Milo (Bill Murray) from a robber. Frank wants to re-pay Mad Dog for saving him so he gives him a girl named Glory (Uma Thurman) for a week of... whatever. It's in that week that Mad Dog takes to first steps to be the person he wants to be, the problem is that when the weeks up Frank, who happens to be a mobster, wants Glory back to work off the rest of the tab she owes him. There's some weird casting in this. De Niro is the quiet, sky photographer while Bill Murray is the crime lord. It's different and it works. The pair play off each other in a way that is mesmerizing on screen. Bill Murray goes beyond his usual schtick and allows a peak at a dark demon that underlies his character who also spends time as a Mafia stand up comic. This film is one of Uma Thurman's greatest performances, balancing out a naive girl who has learned some street smarts since being under Franks thumb.Frank tells Mad Dog when they meet that he had the ability to fulfill his dreams and that's basically what the film shows in a warped sort of path. Mad Dog and Glory is a great movie with some classic performances that may have been forgotten over the years. It's a lost gem of the early 1990's.
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