Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Plain Clothes Blu-ray Movie Review

'88 Jump Street.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 15, 2013

21 Jump Street became one of the true surprise hits of 2012, rebooting a largely forgotten television series that is mostly remembered (if indeed it’s remembered at all) for having helped to introduce Johnny Depp to the public at large. That original television series had been on the air for a few months when Plain Clothes premiered in April, 1988, and one might at least wonder (especially if one tends to be on the cynical side) if the television series’ idea of young cops infiltrating high school may have inspired screenwriter A. Scott Frank’s similar set up. (Of course some would argue that 21 Jump Street was simply a warmed over, slightly tweaked reboot of The Mod Squad, so "inspiration" is obviously an eternal phenomenon.) As she describes in her commentary included on this Blu-ray, Martha Coolidge came to Plain Clothes quite by accident, after she was summarily booted from another film which ended up being directed by John Hughes. Coolidge professes to have loved Frank’s humor right off the bat, and while it’s true that there are some amusing bits scattered throughout Plain Clothes, the operative word is “scattered”, meaning there are fairly large expanses in this film when either nothing funny is happening or indeed where not much is happening at all. The most interesting thing about Plain Clothes may well be its extremely eclectic cast. Arliss Howard (Full Metal Jacket) portrays Nick Dunbar, a well meaning cop who is sick of getting assigned duties that repeatedly put him in contact with kids, a class of humans he can’t stand. When Nick’s little brother Matt (Loren Dean) is accused of having murdered a teacher at his high school, Nick infiltrates the school as a student, where he comes in contact with all sorts of odd people. There’s Mrs. Melway (Diane Ladd, who was Oscar nominated in Coolidge's Rambling Rose), the fussy school secretary, and Mr. Gardner (Robert Stack), the clueless principal who is never aware the school intercom is “live” as he broadcasts a number of unknowing comments to the entire student body. There’s also Mr. Wiseman (Abe Vigoda), an aging teacher who walks around with various mean signs that have been taped to his back, as well as Mr. Butler (George Wendt), the shop teacher who insists there are a million uses for bowling pins, if only you can learn to operate a lathe. Harry Shearer is also on hand as a mystery asthmatic (is this Experiment in Terror all of a sudden?), and Seymour Cassel also shows up as Nick’s cop mentor and buddy Ed, who pretends to be his father during Nick’s school stint.

Part of what ails Plain Clothes is that it doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to be. The film starts out as a sort of amiable if not especially hilarious profile of a young cop. Then when Nick decides to infiltrate high school, there are hints of (ironically, given how Coolidge came to the picture) a John Hughesian romp through academia. But the film has several odd turns, including several scenes between Nick and his brother at jail that are hardly in keeping with a comedy. Later, when Nick starts uncovering all sorts of malfeasance and moral improprieties around the school (you expected anything less?), there are more unsettling tonal shifts that leave the film feeling precariously unbalanced and unfocused. Plain Clothes probably would have been a better entertainment had it kept its light touch evident throughout the procedural aspects as well as the more overt parody elements that color the high school shenanigans. It certainly would have been more cohesive.

Like any good mystery should, Plain Clothes posits a number of intriguing suspects as to who offed the teacher who stumbles into a classroom and dies in the film’s opening sequence. But once Nick starts to unravel certain back stories of various characters, things get awfully confusing and crowded. There’s a real estate scam, and a pension scam and not one but two illicit affairs between older characters and either current or former students. It’s too soap operatic for its own good and in fact sucks the comedy out of the film, leaving something like a slightly stale episode of Peyton Place instead.

There are passing pleasures to be had in Plain Clothes, to be sure. Nick’s initial fear of reliving high school turns out to be both founded and unnecessary, and he soon finds himself with his own social circle as well as a new vocabulary that his partner Ed can’t even begin to fathom. The so-called wardens (tough kids who enforce the Principal’s reign of terror) are at least slightly amusing, again in a John Hughesian sort of way, and the supporting cast, while decidedly odd, is fun to watch, even if occasionally hyperbolic (this applies particularly to Wendt, who is portraying a character miles apart from Cheers’s Norm). But overall the film often feels disjointed and chaotic, never quite sustaining its light comedic touch and devolving into some patent silliness in the climax.

Plain Clothes Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Plain Clothes is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The elements used for this high definition presentation are in very good shape and the bulk of this film looks very good. Colors are accurate and nicely saturated and close-ups pop with commendable fine detail. Contrast is stable if not overwhelmingly strong. Shadow detail remains consistent and provides some nice information in the film's long climax which takes place in the darkened halls of the school. The film has a sort of "eighties softness" (for want of a better term) in midrange shots, but close-ups are quite sharp and clear. As with most Olive releases, no digital tweaking of any kind seems to have been applied to this release, and so a natural layer of grain is quite visible throughout this presentation.

Plain Clothes Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Plain Clothes features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix that presents the film's dialogue and copious source music cues with a lot of energy and precision. Film geeks may be interested to know that this film was exhibited theatrically in the relatively lesser known Ultra Stereo format, which was developed by some Dolby engineers as a competitive format to Dolby itself. The stereo separation here is actually quite wide, with some nicely splayed effects and dialogue, as well as clear stereo separation in the source cues. Fidelity is very good, though dynamic range is rather limited.

Plain Clothes Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director Martha Coolidge. Coolidge offers an enjoyable and informative commentary track that gets into some of the nuts and bolts of the shoot as well as some fun anecdotes about the extremely eclectic cast.

Note: This is another of the strangely authored Olive releases where selecting Special Feature from the Main Menu does nothing until you actually start the film, toggle to the Commentary with the Audio button on your remote, and then return to the Main Menu, where suddenly Special Feature does in fact bring up the Commentary option. Obviously, the easiest way to handle this is simply by using the Audio button on your remote and ignoring the Special Feature option on the Main Menu.

Plain Clothes Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Plain Clothes never quite gels and is hobbled by some inconsistent tone, which veers pretty wildly from light comedy to melodrama, but with a cast like the one in this film, it's hard to go completely off the rails, and that's the case here. The film works best in dribs and drabs, so if you're intrigued by the performers in this film, it might warrant checking out. It's fascinating to hear Martha Coolidge talk about having been booted from what became a John Hughes film before moving on to Plain Clothes, for Hughes may have been able to navigate the tonal waters of Plain Clothes a little better than Coolidge ended up doing.