A Low Down Dirty Shame (1994).
The Stage.
A private eye is hired to find the only woman who can testify against a ruthless crime lord…his ex-lover.
When this came out I was 13 and I remember wanting to see it so badly. Eventually a kid down the street got it on VHS and watching it repeatedly became a summer vacation staple that year. I hadn’t seen it since then, and didn’t remember anything about it, but saw recently that the Rotten Tomatoes score was a measly 5% and thought it had to be better than that…right?
The Review.
Andre Shame was a Los Angeles detective who somehow led an assault against a drug dealer named Ernesto Mendoza in Mexico. Unfortunately, Shame and another officer, Sonny Rothmiller, were the only two people to escape the raid alive. Shame was fired from the force and became a private investigator. In the very first scene of this film, we start to understand why the Mexican raid was unsuccessful - Shame is terrible at project planning and, even more troubling, executing that plan. The cold open involves he and his secretary, Peaches, infiltrating a mob diamond handoff. This scene feels like it was written by a twelve year old version of me, with a bag of diamonds that looks like someone bought a package of jewels for bedazzling and dropped it in a stereotypical velvet bag. Shane gets into the room by hiding in a giant false container built into a maid’s cart and Peaches just rolls him in with her master key. Inside the room are four armed men. After surprising them by popping out of the cart like a stripper from a very clean cake, he dual wields and asks Peaches to leave, even as she offers to help hold the men at bay and here’s where my first question comes in…why bring Peaches in the first place? Clearly this puts her in danger. It’s not like they had to knock on the door, since she conveniently had a master key. Just leave her out of it. He tells her to go bring the car around, but we find out shortly after that she’s not even driving the car, she’s sitting in a limo with the clients who hired Shame to nab the diamonds. As the scene plays out, Shame delivers a series of wisecracks and eventually gets into a gun battle because he’s an idiot and clearly does not understand combat tactics. He never attempts to take the guns from the men in the room, and once he has his hands on the diamonds, he just turns his back and runs as if he knows he’s going to get blasted. He’s also failed to devise any kind of escape plan and in all honesty, should have died right there…but no matter how much danger he’s in, he’ll always try to find a quiet moment to crack a joke.
As an action comedy, his ineptitude could have been part of the movie’s charm if it was played up as a character flaw. Instead, it’s implied that Shame always gets his man, which leaves you wondering how he’s struggling to pay his bills, especially when he’s putting himself in these incredibly dangerous situations. It seems that, in addition to his inability to plan and execute a job safely, he’s also an awful businessman. His financial troubles are just told to us, not shown, as he drives a really cool convertible, wears a nice suit, and has a wall full of guns in his nice Los Angeles office.
Keenan Ivory Wayans, who also wrote and directed the movie, infuses Shame with the personality of a water-logged catchers mitt. His one-liners were clearly meant to make theater audiences howl with laughter but instead, reminded me of that kid in class who thinks he’s a jokester but everyone else just wants him to shut up. His antics, like acting homosexual or posing as a radio DJ on the phone, feel like they could have been left on In Living Color’s cutting room floor. The jokes and situations that were supposed to be funny feel dated, either because of the more accepting world we have worked to create or because of its continuous reliance on 1994’s pop culture references. The two gay characters in the film are solely there to be used as punchlines and overact to the point that one might think they were pulled straight from the Men on Film skits. One particular scene that highlights both the unfunny nature and idiocy of the script sees Shame trying to extort information from a hispanic goon named Luis. Asking nicely for Mendoza’s whereabouts doesn’t work, so instead of imposing some interrogation tactics upon the gentleman, Shame just leaves. Joke’s on Luis though, because right next door there’s a white power Nazi rally going on. Luis interrupts the rally by walking on stage and asking where the exit is, apparently completely deaf to the fact that as he made his way to the stage, the men were chanting “White power!” This, of course, followed by a scene in which the Nazis are chasing him down the street with bats and chains, while Shame slowly drives next to him in an empty Los Angeles with the promise of a ride and a way out of this situation if he can only get Mendoza’s location. As Luis is swarmed by the mob, surely about to die, we hear him scream, “Can’t we all just get along?”
There are two bright spots in the cast. The first, and loudest, is Jada Pinkett-Smith’s role as Peaches. She’s like a live action version of Scrappy Doo. She’s cocksure, brash, and brings a much needed jolt of electricity to the film every time she’s on screen. She’s obsessed with soap operas to the point that she commits assault because of it and for some reason, likes Shame. In a rare nice touch within the set dressing, we see three name plates on her desk - one that has just her name, one that says Peaches Jordan: Secretary, and another that says Peaches Jordan: Executive Secretary. Unfortunately Wayans didn’t really know what to do with her so most of the time she’s shelved for one reason or another until the next time she’s absolutely necessary to move the plot forward. During the main showdown with the villain, she simply says, “I guess I should go wait in the car, huh?” and then leaves, instead of, I don’t know…picking up a gun and shooting the bad guy. The other is Charles S. Dutton as Rothmiller. In one particular scene, a frustrated Rothmiller has a little “Don’t you know who I am?” moment that’s really great and feels like a precursor to Denzel’s nervous rant in Training Day. Unfortunately, the more he’s on screen, the stupider he gets, leading to a fight with Peaches that has several Home Alone-style moments that make you wonder how he ever became a DEA agent in the first place.
The End.
A Low Down Dirty Shame fails on so many levels. It’s not fun, it’s poorly made, the script is nonsense, and there’s no real reason that anyone would be rooting for Andre Shame to succeed. As a character, he doesn’t grow or change at all - in fact, no one really does. The film either needed to have a harder edge and could have leaned into Shame’s deficiencies, starting with thinking he’s cooler than he actually is, or it needed to go full blown comedy since it has some moments that felt like that’s what it wanted to be. In his review for the film, Roger Ebert wrote, “Take away the guns and this would be a movie about too many characters and no way to get rid of them.”, and that about sums it up. And 5% on Rotten Tomatoes? Yeah, that’s about right.
