1989’s The Dream Team is a comedy about four mental patients who have to work together to rescue their doctor after an incident on a field trip from the asylum.
I feel it would be too easy to make comparisons to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and yet this feels roughly like a comedic take on that. Such comparisons are also inevitable as Christopher Lloyd plays a patient in both films. Then there’s Michael Keaton, as a fellow patient, doing his best Jack Nicholson impersonation.
Lloyd’s character is a neat freak who distances himself from his peers by pretending to be one of the doctors. Keaton is a pathological liar with rage issues. Rounding out their therapy group are Peter Boyle as a former prestigious advertising executive who now believes he is Jesus, and Stephen Furst as a man-child who, when he communicates at all, is through regurgitated lines from TV shows and commercials.
Dennis Boutsikaris plays their doctor. I always seem to like this actor in the small roles I have seen him play in many movies and shows over the years. He has a more substantial part here than usual, and he holds his own here against four actors, each of whom could easily take over the film. It helps that he is given some great lines, such as seeing a chair hanging half in a broken window after being thrown by Keaton: “Looks like one of our chairs tried to make a break for it. Gentlemen, I assure you these chairs are innocent.”
The hospital administration and fellow doctors are strenuously opposed to the field trip organized to attend a Yankees game. Even without knowing the plot of this in advance, anybody can tell things are going to go awry, but it is how it goes off the rails that surprised me.
Stopping on the way to let Furst take a leak in an alley, the doctor witnesses two men standing over the body of a man they just killed. Fortunately, many witnesses see these assailants about to kill the doctor, who is only rendered unconscious before they flee.
Furst has seen what happened to the doctor, but is unable to communicate to the others what has happened. So it comes down to the other three to suppress their worst impulses and find the doctor. As captured in an exchange between Boyle and Keaton: “Us? But we’re crazy!” “Then we better get sane real goddamn fast.”
One surprise actor who comes into the picture fairly late is Lorraine Bracco as Keaton’s old squeeze. Between this and Goodfellas, does the actress have something for violent men? She isn’t given much to do here, unfortunately. I do like an exchange she has with Keaton’s pathological liar: “Are you still writing?” “I’m still making things up”
Of everybody in the movie, Boyle probably has the best lines. Things like “My goal was to bring Jesus Christ back into my advertising agency, where he belongs” and “Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.” I also liked when a former colleague compliments Boyle on his legacy as “The James Joyce of Chef Boyardee.”
Now for some random observations, though not as many as I would expect to have. First, seeing the World Trade Center towers in movies never stops being painful. Second, when Boyle is forced to wear the cheapest assortment of clothing in an army surplus store, I didn’t find the combination of clothes as amusing as the realization he would not look out of place almost anywhere today. Third, why did “Walk the Dinosaur” by Was Not Was have to be on the soundtrack? From the first couple of notes, I knew it was going to be stuck in my head for at least the next day.
The Dream Team is not much more than a decent comedy with touches of action and a bit of drama. But it was a very enjoyable and breezy way to pass 90 minutes. Which is a far shorter time than that goddamn Was Not Was song will be stuck in my noggin.
Dir: Howard Zieff
Starring Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Boyle, Stephen Furst
Watched on blu-ray