Film

The Linguini Incident (1991)

Director: Richard Shepard

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

In an ultra-fashionable restaurant, Monte (Bowie) and Lucy (Arquette) are the silver-suited bar staff. Naturally they must fall in love after first disliking each other; less evident is why the bored, cynical restaurateurs should be making million-dollar bets with Monte about whether Lucy can escape from a locked mailbag in a tank of water. Presumably someone, somewhere, must have thought they could get some jokes out of the situation. They were wrong. Bowie drifts through, elegant, unconcerned and vaguely supercilious, leaching the energy from the narrative. Arquette emotes gamely as the waitress who dreams of following in Houdini's footsteps, but even she looks bored, and the sexual chemistry between the two wouldn't singe a gnat's wing. There's some amusement from the Tweedledum/Tweedledee antics of Gregory and Henry as the restaurateurs, but it's slim pickings.

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