What About Bob?

With Dreyfuss and Murray on top form, not even the familiar plotline - uptight rich person meets free-wheeling poor person and learns about life - can prevent this lunatic comedy from being funny. Ideally cast and perfectly matched as an anal-retentive shrink and his multi-phobic patient, the stars generate laughs a-plenty. As the author of a bestselling self-help manual, Dr Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss) should have no trouble coping with a deeply dependent patient who follows him to his lakeside holiday home. But Bob (Murray) fails to heed Leo's professional advice and wreaks havoc in Leo's messed-up family, liberating them from their neuroses. Leo's reaction is neither grateful nor rational... Occasionally, something dark and disturbing threatens to rise to the surface, but this being a formulaic comedy, the ripples caused by Bob's anarchic antics soon give way to the flat calm of normality.