My review was written in May 1988 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.
"Another Chance" is a sex comedy with enough laughs (both intentional and otherwise) to find an audience in today's crowded market. Unfortunately, it tries to cram in too much contrasting material, resulting in wide swings in tone and tastefulness that keep it out of the first rank.
Bruce Greenwood is fresh and appealing as anthero John Ripley, a womanizer who stars in a tv soap. Though all women are his targets (and the film piles on a nonstop parade of California beauties), he soon focuses on British model Jacky (voluptuous Vanessa Angel), smashingly until she catches him with fantasy temptress Barbara Edwards (former Playboy magazine model).
As hinted by an opening nightmare scene of Ripley facing judgment in heaven before St. Peter for his misdeeds, pic is a fantasy, recalling the cautionary Cecil B. DeMille pageants of sin and redemption. Actor turned director Jesse Vint lays it on a bit too thick in contrasting the good side of Ripley's nature (idyllic visits to his cornpone family's farm) and the sleazy lifestyle that not only he bu also his vulgar agen (Frank Annese in a well-tuned performance) and seemingly all of Hollywood epitomize. Pic errs in trying to simultaneously portray sexist attitudes (with the usual exploitation of femme bodies and their depiction as airheads) combined with a criticism of same.
Some outlandish scenes, particularly in the escalating final reels, stand out, as Robert Sacchi carefully sairitizes his typecasting by portraying a psychotic Bogart imitator, with the switch that he picks fights with people rather than the other way around; down and out after breaking up with Jacky, destitute Ripley is reduced to hiring on as an imitator of himself and in one of the film's more acid scenes has to put up with stinging criticism from a lowlife agent.
To pic's detriment, Vint also includes spurious material, such as a disconnected scene of Ripley's beautiful white German shepherd getting killed (so it can figure sentimentally later on) and overreliance on dream sequences, which render the underlying fantasy elements confusing.
Angel (previously in "Spies Like Us") is a real find in the lead role and supporting cast is solid. Rocky the dog certainly is an able scene stealer. In a single scene as the landlady, Anne Ramsey virtually duplicates her recent Oscar-nominated "Throw Momma" persona.
