Gabe
Kaplan, Alex Karras, and Robert Klein are three friends who suffer from various
psychological disorders. Kaplan has
“constant amnesia”, Karras talks to his (dead) invisible mother, and Klein is a
split personality. When Kaplan’s car is
damaged by a pothole, he goes to city hall to demand reparations. The mayor blows him off and Gabe steals a cannon
and threatens the mayor to get the cash.
This
set-up is unlikely, but if it wasn’t handled in such a sub-sitcom way, it
could’ve worked. I’ve enjoyed seeing Kaplan,
Karras, and Klein in various things over years. Each of their characters by themselves
might’ve made for a decent leading man.
Having all three together crowds the narrative. (It takes about a half-hour before anything
approaching a plot starts to take place.)
It also doesn’t help than they have zero chemistry together. Only Susan (Webster) Clark seems to have brought
her charisma to the set as Kaplan’s long-suffering girlfriend.
Kaplan
was likeable on Welcome Back, Kotter, but he’s saddled with some lame gags and shoddy
writing. The running joke where Kaplan starts
to do something and then forgets what he was doing gets tired and played out almost
immediately. The only real scene that
had any potential was when his amnesia hinders his job as a spot-remover
salesman, but even then, the punchline is telegraphed from a mile away.
Directed
by Peter Bonerz (who also has a small role as a crane operator), Nobody’s
Perfekt is more or less a bust. It gets
a good laugh during the opening frame of the movie where the title doesn’t fit
on the screen, but it’s all downhill from there. Things get especially turgid in the third act
when some bank robbers (led by Moe Greene himself, Alex Rocco) plot their
armored car heist around the trio’s shenanigans with their cannon. This leads to an overlong, dumb, and
uninspired car chase that wraps the film up in a dismal manner.
Karras
and Clark (who were married in real life) also appeared in Porky’s the same
year.
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