The Adventures of Ford Fairlane

A detective (Andrew Dice Clay) specializing in the music industry finds himself at the center of a case involving a missing girl, murder, and a record executive (Wayne Newton).

I can’t decide whether The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is just a case of “it’s so bad it’s good,” or that the filmmakers actually knew what they were doing in creating an above average satire of both 1980’s consumerism, action pictures, and the detective genre in general. Either way, the film works.

Andrew Dice Clay is good in the lead. Granted, his trademark shtick and stooge-isms age poorly, but he’s the perfect parody of the super-cool, über-macho detective that began fifty years earlier with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Clay is Marlowe taken to a 1980’s extreme, a loner’s loner who greatest love is an expensive, rare guitar. He struts through the film with a cynical detachment bordering on boredom (another wink to the superman action hero popular in 80’s cinema) yet still manages to retain the audience’s interest through sheer charisma.

Director Renny Harlin, who reportedly got the job helming Die Hard 2 based on this film’s dailies, plays it straight, delivering a slick, polished film that’s visually indistinguishable from the very films it’s lampooning; a perfect dichotomy.

That’s not to say The Adventures of Ford Fairlane isn’t without flaws. At 104 minutes, it wears out its welcome a little too quickly, and while the stunt casting of Wayne Newton works out exceptionally well, the rest of the supporting cast is pretty weak. Still these aren’t fatal to a fun film that’s better than it has any right to be.