Film #186 - Brenda Starr (1989)
Brenda Starr carries a 1989 release date, but it was really produced a couple of years earlier. Legal troubles kept it from release, otherwise it might have been seen as a precursor to the “comic book” revival begun in ‘89 by Batman, instead of as just another attempt to cash in on a fad. While it doesn’ quite succeed, it does a lot of thing right. If the filmmakers had only had more faith in their source materials, it could have been great. As it is, it is an amusing adaptation that doesn’t quite measure up.
The film centers, not on Brenda (Brooke Shields), but on Mike Randall (Tony Peck), the artist who draws Brenda’s strip. When she becomes upset at comments he makes, she leaves the strip, following her own adventures, rather than those set out for her. Mike follows her into the strip to try and convince her to return and finds himself falling for her.
You see, Brenda Starr isn’t exactly the most realistic of strips. It’s very much in the style of a soap opera, with over-the-top characters and unbelievable plots. All of this fun stuff is on view in the movie, as Brenda tries to track down a mysterious fuel with the help of the dashing Basil St. John (Timothy Dalton) and fighting off rival reporter Libby “Lips” Lipscomb (Diana Scarwid) and Russian agents Vladimir (Jeffrey Tambor) and Luba (June Gable). Injected into this fun is Mike, who tries to get Brenda to “loosen up”, which involves doing things she doesn’t want to, like saying “shit”.
And that’s what ruins the film. Mike is totally out of place and breaks up the mood set by the other characters. If the filmmakers had shown faith in the source material and just made the film a fun, Brenda Starr adventure, I think it would have fared much better. Luckily, Mike doesn’t totally ruin the experience.
For one thing, Brooke Shields really lives it up as Brenda. She brings just the right mix of naïveté and fiestiness to the role, perfectly balancing the silliness of the basic premise with solid adventure. Dalton brings his usual suave persona to Basil, providing the perfect companion to Brenda, making the notion that she would ever be interested in Mike unbelieveable. Scarwid, Tambor and Gable provide plenty of over-the-top laughs, rendering Mike’s shenangians uneccesary. It all points to a film that doesn’t need Mike and would be better without him.
And that’s how it breaks down: when Mike is off-screen, Brenda Starr is a nice, fun adaptation of the comic strip. When he’s onscreen, we have an odd, disjointed attempt at some sort of commentary on the comic strip. If they had stuck to the former, we’d have a decent little film on our hands. The intereference of the latter, however, dooms it.