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Ruthless People Movie Review

Ruthless People is a 1986 comedy film directed by Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker and starring Danny DeVito and Bette Midler. It’s a hilarious movie.

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“Oh my God! I’ve been kidnapped by Huey and Dewey!“

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A businessman cheats a couple. They retaliate by kidnapping his wife, but things don’t go as planned and the evil businessman is happy with the abduction of his spouse. This is one of the most underrated 80s comedies and one of the funniest by far. It has stood the test of time gloriously, so much so in fact that it’s much better and smarter than most better-known comedies from the era.

It features a tremendous cast. I loved seeing Danny DeVito playing the prototype of Frank Reynolds in this movie. He has never been funnier in a film than he was here. Gleefully misanthropic, vile and nasty, he hates his wife with every fiber of his being, resulting in many hilarious lines of dialogue where he is joyous at hearing the possibility of his wife dying. He probably received an overly unhappy ending, but his arc was very funny nonetheless and DeVito shined through every scene with so much endless charisma and odd charm.

Another standout is Bette Midler herself. I’ve never seen her be this good, this witty or this memorable. The way she performed her gags are, yes, over-the-top, but this type of acting fitted the role like a glove and she was gloriously campy in almost every moment. She was also somehow very likable.

The best parts were her working out sessions and her initial mental torture of her captors. Those lines were both hilarious and very sophisticated. Some of her dialogue can never be understood by a kid as it was very descriptive and smart, but still vile while DeVito’s dialogue was on-the-nose in its nastiness and directness.

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Others were inferior to these two. In fact, I found the main two characters so captivating that the movie would have been better had they cut off the supporting players. Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater are both excellent in their respective roles, but these two are ridiculous how stupid they are. Some of the scenes between Midler and Slater are quite charming, though.

Bill Pullman in his first role and Anita Morris fared even worse. These are decidedly straight characters in a comedy movie that are there for the purpose of the story, so they do not get much development. The intermingling of all these characters and situations was actually handled surprisingly well in terms of editing and pacing, but it was still problematic.

The ending wasn’t my cup of tea. It was both too chaotic and also implausible in its developments. The movie initially did tackle all of these plot points deftly, but the ending went off the rails in a direction that I honestly found to be disappointing.

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Still, Ruthless People is superbly directed, shot and acted. The writing is top-notch and the first half is absolutely brilliant throughout. All of the scenes with Midler and DeVito are phenomenal and wildly entertaining while the humor is consistent almost throughout. I have rarely laughed as much as I did here during any other comedy from the eighties.