10/10/97
MOVIE REVIEW: RocketMan
Harland Williams is a genial, goofy hero

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**1/2 (out of five)
Starring Harland Williams, Jessica Lundy, William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn, Beau Bridges. A Walt Disney picture written by Craig Mazan and Greg Erb, directed by Stuart Gillard. Rated PG, contains comic violence. Running time: 93 minutes.

Comic Harland Williams stars as an amiable lunkhead who gets sent on a mission to Mars in the goofy RocketMan, a film that will have young children in stitches.

Everyone over the age of 10 should beware, however. This is a movie whose biggest and longest and funniest gag revolves around flatulence which causes a spacesuit to expand to enormous size.

Williams is a very physical comedian of the Jim Carrey type. In fact, Williams made his film debut opposite fellow Torontonian Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. Whereas people have described Carrey as rubber-faced, Williams can be described as putty-faced. In other words, Hollywood is looking for another Jim Carrey and hopes it has found him in Harland Williams.

As RocketMan's geeky Fred Z. Randall, Williams is both endearing and amusing. "I'm 30 years old. I'm almost a full-grown man," he pleads with his worried mother. Williams also scores on physical gags. Slapstick could be his middle name as his face turns to mush while riding a G-force training accelerator machine that's spinning wildly, later flinging his seat through a wall and down several corridors.

Similarly, Williams makes a splash landing on Mars when he falls down the ladder over a fellow astronaut, the one who is supposed to be the first to set foot on the planet. There are plenty of cute things, like planting a pair of red-white-and-blue boxer shorts as a flag on the red planet and performing monkeyshines with a precocious chimpanzee named Ulysses (Raven).

Yet, there's nothing really fresh here. RocketMan looks like one of those lightweight, '60s Disney live-action films: Moon Pilot Meets The Monkey's Uncle.

But the kids will enjoy the colorful adventures and be able to relate to this awkward child-man who constantly bumps into objects, can sing When You Wish Upon a Star in Jiminy Cricket's voice and nearly flushes himself down a toilet and out of the spaceship. Williams makes a gentle, genial, if goofy hero.

And there are sweet moments, too, with the budding romance between him and co-astronaut Julie Ford (Jessica Lundy). In one of RocketMan's most lighthearted scenes they dance on the ceiling in the weightlessness of space.