Cadillac Man (1990) * *

 

Directed by:  Roger Donaldson

Starring:  Robin Williams, Tim Robbins, Fran Drescher, Lori Petty, Pamela Reed, Paul Herman, Annabella Sciorra, Zack Norman, Paul Guilfoyle, Lauren Tom, Judith Hoag, Eddie Jones, Anthony Powers

Cadillac Man is a tale of two movies.  The first one has bigger comic possibilities than the second one.  The first is a profile of hotshot car salesman Joey O'Brien (Williams), who has taken on more debt and more women than he can handle.  He owes $20,000 to a local gangster who begs him to pay it back so he won't have to have him whacked.   He has an ex-wife Tina (Reed) who still loves him but divorced him due to his womanizing ways.  His daughter stays out all night with a loser boyfriend.   He has two girlfriends:  Joy (Drescher) who is married to one of Joey's customers but wants to marry Joey, and Lila (Petty), a fledgling fashion designer who also loves Joey.   

Joey has been slumping at his job enough to earn an ultimatum from his boss Little Jackie (Guilfoyle):  Sell twelve cars tomorrow or be out of a job.  Joey lets Jackie use his apartment to conduct an affair with dealership secretary Donna (Sciorra), but hey business is business.   Little Jackie's trysts with Donna leads to the second half of the movie, which is Donna's husband Larry (Robbins) crashing through the dealership's window on his motorcycle and holding everyone hostage with an automatic weapon and a bomb strapped to his cycle. 

Larry knows someone is sleeping with Donna, but doesn't know whom.  Joey, in a bid to protect Little Jackie and save his job, tells Larry he is Donna's lover.  Larry isn't bright and his plan to take hostages wasn't well thought out.  But Robbins makes him sympathetic because, dammit, he loves his wife.  Joey becomes Larry's advisor and confidante while acting as a liaison between Larry and the police.  Larry is surprised when the police don't heed his warning to "go away"

This may be the best sales job Joey has ever performed, and this is a guy who in the beginning of the film is trying to sell a widow a car on the day of her husband's funeral when the hearse breaks down.  Williams is at home here as a man enduring too many self-inflicted pressures.  The hostage crisis may have been the best thing for Joey, because once each of his lovers finds out about the others, they all leave him.  "Thanks for simplifying my love life," he tells Larry.  

But Cadillac Man feels like two different stories fighting for the same screen.  I would've preferred to see if Joey could sell twelve vehicles in a day to save his job and whatever means he could use to make that happen.  Instead, we get a plot which wastes all of the buildup from the first half in order to give us a safer back half which doesn't work nearly as well.