ANDY GARCIA'S LATEST film, Steal Big, Steal Little concerns a couple of tremendously competitive twins, which is an interesting subject for me because I grew up knowing some twins who fit that exact description. If one learned to juggle, the other had to learn to juggle better. If one learned to play drums, the other had to learn to play drums better. And when it came time to part ways, the competition didn't stop--it just found new ways to manifest itself from afar.
The picture has an ambitious goal: to create the most extreme version of this relationship possible. Twins Ruben Partida Martinez and Robert Martin parted ways as children due to divorcing parents; since then they've become polar opposites. Ruben is a disorganized quasi-Marxist whose baggy green-and-brown outfits suggest Robin Hood merged with Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. Robby, meanwhile, is a slick-haired, ring-wearing land developer with tinges of Gordon Gekko and J.R. Ewing.
These formulaic costumes are fortunate because Andy Garcia, good-looking and charismatic though he is, doesn't really have the skills to subtly shade his twin characters like, say, Jeremy Irons did in Dead Ringers. But Garcia's performance doesn't hurt the film nearly as much as its out-of-control plot.
When the twins' mother dies and leaves her entire 40,000-acre
Santa Barbara ranch and estate to the good-hearted Ruben, Robby
feels spurned and tries every trick possible to get it back. The
standard big-guy-versus-little-guy format takes over, with Ruben
and an extended family of misfits matching wits against Robby
and his team of lawyers, government insiders and tycoons.
Robby pulls a slimy legal maneuver, so Ruben humiliates Robby by lassoing him during an exhibition polo match. Robby buys out the judge at a trial, so Ruben gets a friend to sing an insult-o-gram at the judge's door. And on it goes until you wish somebody would just spank the both of them.
Director Andrew Davis, who cut his teeth making Steven Seagal films until hitting it big with The Fugitive, smartly downplays these incidents and gives wider focus to the spirit of activism that infects Ruben and his odd assortment of big-business-fighting comrades. Led by the likably domineering Alan Arkin, who plays Ruben's best friend, during these scenes Steal Big, Steal Little evokes a sense of improvisation and spontaneous mirth.
You can't help getting a few positive feelings out of the movie's sense of good cheer. Almost everybody in the picture knows everybody else--even a hit man hired to kill Arkin turns out to be an old buddy. Most of the "bad" characters are forgiven and re-assimilated into the group. And on at least four occasions the characters stop what they're doing to dance and enjoy themselves.
Unfortunately, these scenes aren't enough to hold the movie together; in fact, they turn into another liability. Films with scopes as wide and tangential as Steal Big, Steal Little can handle only so much zaniness before crossing over the line into incoherence. Where Davis was controlled and purposeful in his handing of The Fugitive, he loses his grip here.
The movie's lowest point places Garcia and Arkin in an absurd church flagellation scene involving a lawyer (Joe Pantoliano, best known as "Guido the Killer Pimp" from Risky Business) who double-crossed them. Eventually that same lawyer ends up in drag.
During its airborne climax Steal Big, Steal Little also manages to prove Roger Ebert's theory that no good movie (with the sole exception of The Wizard of Oz) has ever contained a hot-air balloon.
But the worst indication that Davis and his team of screenwriters have lost control of their material is the fact that the second twin, Robby, almost disappears entirely from the film. Ruben and his cronies rarely even come into contact with the man (though when they do, you can be sure there will be state-of-the-art effects to put two Andy Garcias in the same frame in an impressive way). And besides being a spiteful, competitive bastard, we never find out who Robby is. Near the end, when his ex-wife tells him, "I understand your pain," we have no idea what she's talking about.
Ruben and Robby do reconcile, as if anybody had any doubts, but the things that make twins interesting--the way their egos have to fight to create their own separate identities, the way their love and identification often becomes smothered by competition and resentment--never receive adequate exploration. When you get done watching Steal Big, Steal Little, you may wonder, "Why'd they bother creating twin characters in the first place?"
