This is an action-comedy-spy movie, with a lot of wedding drama. Michael Douglas is Steve, an undercover C.I.A. agent in the middle of a deal with international smugglers and arms dealers to sell a stolen nuclear submarine, while the F.B.I. thinks he's gone rogue and is trying to arrest him. Albert Brooks is Jerry, a boring podiatrist who doesn't like doing anything new or taking risks. He's afraid of heights and and won't even fly in an airplane. Their son and daughter are getting married in a few days, so Steve invites everyone out to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant where he has also arranged to secretly meet a foreign agent about the submarine deal.
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Steve reminisces with the owner about their time together in Vietnam, then he orders the special for everybody, telling Jerry he's going to flip out. In what looks like an attempt to match the comedy of the snake surprise dinner scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, we see a giant un-skinned snake on the table on a bed of fruit and vegetables. There's an orange in the snake's mouth as if it's eating it, with the head directly in front of Jerry. We can see that everyone but Jerry has cut open the snake, with its rib bones sticking out, and they are using chop sticks to eat the snake meat. Steve asks Jerry if he's all right, as he stares into the snake's mouth, not eating anything, and he replies that his food is still eating. Later, after Steve goes into the restroom to deal with the foreign agent, his wife complains that he hasn't even tasted it and he tells her that it's one of the stars of the Discovery Channel and he might as well eat Barbra Walters. She was a star broadcast journalist, not a Discovery Channel animal, but it's still a funny joke.
The snake special is a fake snake that is probably meant to be a python, but it looks real enough, and the bones sticking out of the body are a nice touch. |