Checking Out Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Checking Out Blu-ray Movie Review

Does this hypochondriac comedy generate belly laughs or belly aches?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater January 14, 2011

There are few actors working today with Jeff Daniels’ range. He’s basically done it all in his career, molding his everyman persona to fit almost every imaginable kind of material, from low-brow slapstick (Dumb and Dumber) and high-minded indie dramas (The Squid and the Whale), to historical epics (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals), action thrillers (Speed), kids’ flicks (Because of Winn Dixie), and b-movie horror comedies (Arachophobia). Checking Out is one of the actor’s more obscure vehicles—it brought in a paltry $31,000 when it was released in 1989—but it finds Daniels in fine form as a man slowly losing his mind to medical anxiety. Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t up to par with Daniels’ performance.

Daniels plays Ray Macklin, an airline company executive who’s rapidly approaching middle age. Something snaps in Ray’s brain when his best friend and coworker (Allan Havey) dies of a massive coronary at a backyard tiki torch party, right in the middle of telling the oldest joke in the book—“Why don’t Italians have barbeques?” Ray’s aggravation over never learning the joke’s punch line is one of the film’s running gags, but our protagonist has a more pressing concern: He’s suddenly terrified that he too will keel over and die at any minute. Ray becomes fanatically obsessed with his own impending mortality. He dreams that he falls into an enormous grave, and upon waking he jumps out of his bedroom window to escape this nightmare scenario and lands atop his car, where he clutches his chest in a heart-thumping panic and totally freaks out his wife (Melanie Mayron) and neighbors. Convinced now that there’s something dreadfully and inexorably wrong with him—some phantom illness that will fell him out of the blue like a tree struck by lightening—Ray consults one specialist after another, desperate for a diagnosis but petrified by what he might find out.

These episodic encounters with doctors and other medical professionals form the bulk of the film, which is generally more concerned with sight comedy and slapstick than saying anything meaningful about Ray’s fear of death, a fear that we can all relate to after a certain age. Perhaps this lack of depth can be best explained by noting that the script was written by Joe Eszterhas, who would go on to pen the Golden Raspberry Award-winning screenplay for Showgirls. Eszterhas’ best-known scripts—Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Jade—tend to straddle an uncomfortable line between utter trashiness and satire, but while the Hungarian-born writer gets a few jabs in here at the sexual politics of the 1980s business environment and the hypocrisies of the overly health-conscious, he mainly seems to be out for simple laughs, pushing the situational comedy to absurdity and beyond. Occasionally it works—see Ray’s car sex encounter with his secretary, which prefigures the comically exaggerated orgasmic flailing of Showgirls—but many of the jokes fall flat, like when Ray visits a clearly non-Japanese doctor who speaks, for some unexplained reason, in a katakana Engrish accent. The ridiculousness climaxes in a fever-dream vision of heaven as a desert oasis where Howard Hawks presides as God and the Hawaiian shirt-attired deceased live in tacky multi-colored cabanas and while away eternity singing “Dixie” by the poolside. It seems like something out of a much-lesser David Lynch film.

Director David Leland, who wrote the tender crime romance Mona Lisa—and, most recently, helmed the randy, straight-to-video flop Virgin Territory—keeps the film moving but can’t quite make sense out of Eszterhas’ wacky, incomplete-feeling script. The tone is frantic and sometimes amusing but rarely laugh-out-loud hilarious; from a modern vantage point, the funniest thing about the film is the god-awful 1980s fashions. (I’m not talking about the hip, New Wave-y styles that have recently resurfaced, but rather the ill-fitting suits, the dorky baseball caps, the bad hair, and the buttoned-to-the-neck prairie dresses that look like they were bought at the general store on a polygamist compound. Which makes me think—I can’t wait to hear what people are going to say about Ugg boots twenty years from now.) That said, Checking Out is a showcase for Jeff Daniels, who, despite having less-than-ideal material to work with, manages to hold our attention. I always prefer him in more serious roles— like John C. Reilly, he’s surprisingly adept at playing sad-clown sensitive—but it’s fun to watch him here, flipping out as he grapples with increasingly intensifying delusions that he’s about to get mowed down by Death’s razor-edged scythe.

Checking Out Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Of all the HandMade titles that Image Entertainment has brought to Blu-ray thus far, Checking Out, on some hypothetically objective, absolute scale, probably looks the best. While a full restoration simply isn't in the cards—really, fans are lucky they're getting these films at all—the movie's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is organic and untouched by any digital tinkering. Like I mentioned in my review of Cold Dog Soup, it looks like Image ran the film through the telecine machine, gave it a solid encode, and called it a day. And there's nothing wrong with that. The film's grain structure is natural, and while the image tends toward slight softness, there's no mistaking this as anything but a high definition presentation, with plenty of visible detail in facial features and the patterns of Ray's wool suits. The film's color scheme is distinctly 1980s—realistic, given to light, almost pastel hues—and black levels are suitably dense. The print itself is in fairly good condition, with only a few black specks popping up on occasion, and aside from some light noise in out-of-focus areas of darker scenes, there are no overt signs of compression. This is no demo disc, but it certainly looks true to source.

Checking Out Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Likewise, there are no real issues with the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, but it's rarely better than merely serviceable. With all the jokes and zingers flying around, you can expect a front-anchored, dialogue-dominated mix, and the vocals are always clear and balanced. The rear speakers are only sparsely used, mostly for quiet ambience, a few discrete cross-channel effects, and score. Unsurprisingly, there's not much low-end in the mix—aside from a few scenes where jets pass by overhead—but the mid-range is solid and highs are clean. None of this stands out as particularly impressive, or even well designed, but I'm guessing you're not planning on buying Checking Out for the audio experience.

Checking Out Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The lone bonus feature on the disc is a 35-minute, standard definition montage of trailers for other films in the HandMade catalog.

Checking Out Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

So, why don't Italians have barbeques? I thought everyone knew this one: Because the spaghetti keeps falling through the grill. (Ba-dum-ching!) It's an unfunny punch line to a film that struggles semi-successfully to be funny. I'm not sure that Checking Out is worth revisiting twenty-two years after it was released, but if you're a longtime Jeff Daniels fan, I suppose you may want to, you know, check it out.