Theodosius
For me it's a typical comedy-drama-romance film of the early 90s. It is quite amusing, although Pauly Shore isn't the type of actor I really like; his ugly figure in this movie (I haven't seen him anywhere else so far) doesn't seem that funny to me and doesn't help in the romance/drama part of the film.After an awkward start the film gets better towards the end. Carla Cugino is quite good but a bit sourpuss. I bet that if Tiffani-Amber Thiessen was the lead female character, the film would have been much better. In general I think that the choice of the two leading actors didn't really help a film that has an interesting plot.
hte-trasme
"Son in Law" is a fairly entertaining country-boy/city-boy comedy starring the now much-maligned Pauly Shore. It's a basic twist on an old formula: here, young girl from conservative small-town America goes to college, meets druggie super-senior boy, brings him home for Thanksgiving, ends of up deceiving family into thinking they're engaged. Of course, Pauly's character ends up pulling the usual gags as he tries to make himself a farmer.There are plenty of flaws in this film, but it manages to make itself a pleasant and entertaining nonetheless. The fish-out-f-water comedy is driven by stereotypes of country and city life, and the two main characters are never really developed as characters. All we ever learn about Rebecca, the female lead, is that she is a college freshman impressionable enough to transform from conservative to rebel on the strength of a few trips out with her RA. That RA, in Pauly Shore, is never explored in the script very much either, but makes much more of an impression due to Shore's extravagant performance. His dopey, burned-out, uninhibited character is the kind that I might have considered unbelievable if I hadn't actually met people like that in college (likewise, the played-up college scenes at the beginning might have seemed over the top if they hadn't resembled a real college dorm slightly exaggerated).The movie turns on Shore's noisy but mellow Californian character, and most of the comedy comes not from the dime-a-dozen plot but from placing this particular crazy nut in a variety of incongruous situations. Often enough this works and while Shore might not be the greatest actor in history he certainly manages to put on a reasonably effective broad-comic persona. The best characters, actually, are Rebecca's family, which actually show hints of complexity and realism in their violent but understandable reaction to Crawl's intrusion into their lives, and their gruffness turning to friendliness.Don't expect any big surprises of heaps of subtlety from this mainstream comedy, but truth be told I had fun watching it
merklekranz
Frantic, somewhat mean spirited, infantile humor abounds in this city boy turned wannabe farmer tale. It is not outrageous enough to appeal to the Will Ferrell crowd, and not interesting enough to carry the feature length. The most I can praise "Son In Law" would be to say that for the most part it avoids toilet humor. The main problem is that all of the characters lack warmth, and Pauly Shore is so abrasive that he is a most unlikable hero. There are a few amusing bits involving farm animals, and that's about it. The story, what there is, is so simplistic and predictable, it makes "Jury Duty" seem like "Gone with the Wind". - MERK
ccthemovieman-1
Here's another of these modern-day ultra-sleaze comedies in which dysfunctional families are supposedly hilarious. Know wonder people once asked, "What ever happened to Pauly Shore?" Well, Shore didn't disappear, but his career took a nose-dive, that's for sure. Movies like this one, didn't help.In "Son-In-Law," Shore plays an incredibly-obnoxious character called "Crawl," and yet he's the most likable of the family! His father is a profane idiot; his mother is totally incompetent, his young brother is a sex maniac and his college-age sister is a real snot.Watching an hour and a half of totally-unlikeable people was tough to do. I certainly wouldn't watch this again, or recommend it to anyone but die-hard Shore fans. Adam Sandler took Pauley's shtick and went a lot further with it.The following is an excerpt from the IMDb title page here under "biography" and it explains why I am not the only one who was disgusted with this movie."........but his lunacy was dismissed as crude, dumb and, for the most part, unfunny. His film career quickly tanked. This downhill spiral was not helped by the failure of his failed Fox sitcom "Pauly" (1997) in 1997. Lambasted unmercifully by both critics and media alike, he was soon becoming a running joke and forced to lie low and ride out the storm...."
AD
