Dana Carvey is one of the last great actors who came from Saturday Night Live. There are now only about 2 or 3 that are worth seeing their movies. This is classic of Carvey. It kept me laughing all the way through even though they tried to make it a sappy romance at one point. The cons were funny and so was his character. If you like seeing Carvey then this film is for you. If you don't I would suggest watching something different or some old SNL to see what he is like. Good movie all around I believe though.
Opportunity Knocks
1990
Action / Comedy / Romance
Opportunity Knocks
1990
Action / Comedy / Romance
Plot summary
Eddie and Lou are a couple of two-bit con men on the lam from a loan shark. They hide out in someone's house and they hear on the answering machine that (A) the owner of the house is out of the country for a month or two and (B) the housesitter supposed to watch the house for the absent owner won't be able to watch the house due to a new job in another part of the country. This provides for a pretty nifty arrangement for Eddie and Lou...until the relatives of the house owner drop by to visit. Eddie quickly adopts the guise of the person supposedly housesitting for the owner, and the shenanigans start from there.
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June 28, 2019 at 05:40 AM
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Dana Carvey one of the last greats
As Pericles said to the Athenians: I really need another beer.
The first feature film starring vehicle for 'Saturday Night Live' cast member Dana Carvey casts him as Eddie Farrell. Eddie is a Chicago con artist, who along with his partner Lou (Todd Graff, "The Abyss") has run afoul of powerful mobster Sal Nichols (James Tolkan, the "Back to the Future" series). Hiding out at a posh suburban home into which he's broken, Eddie is mistaken for the house-sitter by amiable Milt (Robert Loggia, "Big") and his wife Mona (Doris Belack, "Tootsie"). From there he is able to con his way into a plum job, working for bathroom fixture tycoon Milt. Milt conveniently has a gorgeous daughter, Annie (Julia Campbell, "Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion"), a hard-working young doctor with whom Eddie naturally falls in love.
"Opportunity Knocks" may be really no ball of fire, but it certainly delivers a decent amount of laughs, and remains pretty pleasant throughout. Ultimately, the story is quite formulaic and predictable, with Eddie developing a conscience and feeling that he can't keep on lying to Milt and his family. Still, there's a certain satisfaction as the character uses all of his skills to rope Sal into an untenable situation and thereby get his revenge. This being rated PG-13, the violence never gets overly serious, with the mobster characters managing to be intimidating without being as thoroughly nasty as they could have been had the movie been rated R.
As a vehicle for Carvey, "Opportunity Knocks" consistently does its job, offering him the opportunity to do some real acting while also indulging in some un-P. C. dialect shtick (and even his "impression" of then-U. S. president George H. W. Bush). Most priceless is when Carvey belts out a rendition of "Born to be Wild" at a karaoke bar, and does some truly goofy dancing at a bar mitzvah. But the whole cast is engaging; look also for improv comedy legend Del Close (the "Blob" remake) in a bit role. Ever-delightful Milo O'Shea ("Barbarella") has a nice supporting role as Max, Eddies' mentor in the art of the con.
Good fun in general, and one of the more entertaining movies from this era to showcase an SNL talent.
Seven out of 10.
A starring vehicle for Dana Carvey
Donald Petrie has directed plenty of movies you may know, even if you don't know him. Mystic Pizza, Grumpy Old Men, Richie Rich, My Favorite Martian, Miss Congeniality, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days...he's made some memorable films. This effort is from the time when Dana Carvey was a star on Saturday Night Live, but before Wayne's World made him a bigger star.
Carvey plays con man Eddie Farrell, who is working a scam with his friend Lou Pesquino. They sneak into an empty house and discover that the owner is out of the country and the house sitter can't make it. After a gang of thugs get sent by mobster Sal Nichols (Detective Hugh Lubic from Masters of the Universe and Strickland from Back to the Future), the two split up and Eddie takes on the identity of the home's real owner, Jonathan Albertson.
Soon, Eddie is growing close to businessman Milt Malkin (Robert Loggia) and his wife Mona, as well as their daughter Annie (Julia Campbell, the mean girl from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion). It all starts as a con, but soon Eddie is falling for her.
This is a movie packed with actors that you rush to IMDB to look up, like Milo O'Shea as Eddie's uncle Max (he was Durand-Durand in Barbarella), the first acting role of jazz musician John M. Watson Sr. (he's the bartender in Groundhog Day) and Del Close, who was one of the most influential people in the history of American improv. He's also Reverend Meeker in the vastly underrated 1988 remake of The Blob.
I really need to get to a Robert Loggia week on this site, even if nobody but me wants to talk about how great he is in movies like the Independence Day movies (actually, he's the only good part of the sequel other than the fact that it mercifully ended), Lost Highway, Big (one could argue that he's playing the same exact role from that film in Opportunity Knocks) and The Believers.
You may be surprised - certainly, many people watching this and reviewing it on Letterboxd are - that in 1990, we didn't have the cultural sensitivities toward stereotypical accents. Just keep that in mind and understand that this is a goofy comedy that just wants to entertain you.