Oprah Movie Club Pick for Second Half of February: Junior


1994 science fiction romantic comedy

Rating: 5/20

Plot: After losing funding, a male fertility researcher decides to continue a project by impregnating himself. His partner, a guy who may or may not be a little person, finds him an egg and pokes him with a sharp object, and wallah! Science! Science and hilarity!

The poster says "Nothing is inconceivable," but I can think of one thing that is--that movie producers actually thought this was a good idea. I think this movie must be some kind of practical joke on the people. Now, I'm sure this is all because I'm not a scientist and can't fully understand what's going on here, but I don't think the entire premise of this movie makes any sense. In fact, it's almost illogical in offensive ways. Generally, when you team up Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger, only good things happen, but it's almost impossible to imagine either one of them as doctors or researchers. As I've probably said before, it's probably impossible to even imagine Schwarzenegger as an actual human being. He puts on a clinic on wooden acting with this thing. For the majority of his scenes, I had trouble figuring out what emotions he was even attempting to display, and the poorly-written dialogue really didn't clue me in enough. Within the first two minutes of the movie, Schwarzenegger is out-acted by a baby. "Hello? There's a baby in here. There must be a mother." And then by the 3:30 mark, he's out-acted by a monkey. Neither of those is surprising. Everything he does in this is just so completely unnatural, and it's just weird having a movie about a pregnant man where the pregnancy seems normal and non-phenomenal while the other characters not laughing at the main character every time he does anything at all seems completely unbelievable. Arnold does get one action sequence where he throws a guy into a bunch of test tubes after yelling about how it's "My body, my choice" before fleeing the scene and saying "That was scary" in a way that would make the Terminator gag. But seriously, watch the scene where he's saying, "Franks in the blankets! Franks in the blankets! They're my favorites!" and tell me that any person who has ever lived on earth has ever acted like that. Oh, and later in the movie where Arnold pretends to be a woman? Boy howdy, that's really something else. Dig Arnold's attempt at a feminine voice. I would have said, "Fuck this. I'm done!" at that point, but I was already so far into it. Danny DeVito isn't much better actually, and everybody else in the movie is at least twice as tall as him. And there's just something horrifying about watching DeVito giving Schwarzenegger an ultrasound. Of course, a dream sequence where there's a baby with Arnold's face CGI-ed on it is even more horrifying. A subplot involving DeVito's ex-wife is not only superfluous but entirely predictable, and the budding relationship between Arnold and Emma Thompson is not believable at all, not because I don't think Emma Thompson would be interested in a guy who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger but who has the mind of a fertility researcher but because there's really nothing that happens that would inspire a woman to fall in love. And he's a pregnant man. I forgot about that. There are chunks of this that I think are supposed to be funny, but it was really hard to tell. Take a scene where Thompson and Arnold are dancing. Thompson's character has a piece of toilet paper stuck to her heel. She starts trying to kick it off. Arnold, her dance partner, imitates her. The shoe and toilet paper fly across the room and land on somebody's plate. Arnold runs over, grabs the shoe, and says, "I found it!" I think that's supposed to be funny, but again, this could all be a bad practical joke played on all of us. There's another part where Schwarzenegger gives DeVito a urine sample, and it ends up being about ten times more urine than I'm able to produce in a single day. Is that a joke? Throw in some fake pregnancy stomachs that don't look real at all, a godawful montage with a terrible song performed by (I think) Patty Smyth, and almost constant music, and you've got yourself a movie that feels like it was scraped off the bottom of Hollywood's piss pot, a movie that comes across as creepy rather than funny, and a genuinely unpleasant experience. Oh, and you know what else? Fred Stoller is in this in a very small role as a waiter. And you know what? He's terrible. He couldn't be a background character, just barely above an extra, without being completely distracting.

Speculation: Brianna McConnell and Brittany McConnell both play the titular offspring of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I know that most of the time they like to use twins for a role like this, but I can't stop imagining a scenario where Arnold accidentally squeezed one of the babies to death or maybe mistakenly ate the child, and it had to be replaced. And that's probably funnier than this entire movie.

This movie made me a little angry.

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