An N.Y.C. film school student accepts a job with a local mobster who resembles a famous cinema godfather and who takes the young man under his wing, after demanding total loyalty.
I remember going to see “The Freshman” in cinemas when it was first released in 1990 with a group of my classmates from film school back in Dublin, Ireland. We skipped school one afternoon because we all wanted to see Brando on the biggest screen possible and while we had fun with it at the time, the movie was nothing memorable. Even to this day, it still ranks as one of the least funny films that he was a part of. I got the joke, here was Brando, one of the finest actors of his generation, parodying one of his most famous movie roles but aside from that aspect, “The Freshman” was unamusing and laborious to sit through. It was and still is, a one-joke feature. I can imagine the producers pitching the idea to the studio: “We’ll get Brando to lampoon ‘The Godfather’ and we will make cinematic gold!” Um, no, I’m afraid not.
Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) moves to New York City from Vermont to attend New York University to study film. When he gets mixed up with a local hustler, Victor Ray (Bruno Kirby), Victor’s uncle, Carmine Sabatini (Marlon Brando), who is the spitting image of Vito Corleone from “The Godfather,” offers Clark $1,000 a week to deliver merchandise from the airport to special clients, and having no money, he accepts the job. For his first assignment, Carmine’s daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller) suggests that he brings help along with him and when he and his classmate Steve (Frank Whaley) turn up at the airport, they are shocked to discover a large Komodo dragon waiting for them. When they stop to get gas, the dragon escapes from their car and into a local mall, causing all sorts of chaos but they quickly recapture it and deliver it to its final destination, the Fabulous Gourmet Club, run by Larry London (Maximilian Schell) and his assistant Edward (BD Wong).
When Clark is approached by two undercover agents, Chuck Greenwald (Jon Polito) and Lloyd Simpson (Richard Gant) of the Department of Justice, they inform him that Carmine is really a Mafia boss who owns the Fabulous Gourmet Club, where endangered animals are served to rich clients. Given the choice of going to prison for his participation in delivering the Komodo dragon to the club, or aiding them in capturing Carmine, he reluctantly agrees to help them but when he informs Carmine of the two agents, Carmine tells him that they are corrupt and want him dead as they are working for a rival crime family. Together, Clark and Carmine devise a plan of their own but when Clark’s environmental activist stepfather Dwight (Kenneth Welsh) turns up to the club with Greenwald and Simpson, it throws a spanner into the works and forces Clark to improvise a new strategy, before it’s too late.
The performances in “The Freshman” are one of its only saving graces. While the story is unoriginal and at times, painfully unfunny, besides the acting, the only other redeeming aspect is how much they got Brando to resemble his Vito Corleone character from “The Godfather.” With the right lighting and cinematography, even though almost twenty years had passed since the 1972 classic, at times, you’d swear you were watching that movie. Brando and Broderick shared undeniable onscreen chemistry, it’s just a pity they couldn’t come up with a story to match their combined talents.
Now available on Retro VHS Blu-ray from Mill Creek Entertainment
