New York City sure is a tiny place, at least judging by the way the same characters keep bumping into one another coincidentally in the teen comedy New York Minute.
This breezy, lightweight film, crafted as the big-screen debut of teenage media stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, will surely please their young fans, though the plot often seems cobbled from bits of several other, better movies, including What's Up, Doc?, The First Wives Club and any number of chase-scene comedies.
New York Minute also contains more toilet humor than any three teen comedies combined, much of it revolving around a pampered pooch who has swallowed a computer chip and the frantic attempts to get it out of him. This, alas, is the silly nugget of the film's subplot, so to speak, which involves a limousine driver who is after that computer chip for his adoptive Chinese mother, a con artist involved in pirated movies and music, which are encoded on the disk.
A running gag, involving Eugene Levy as a gung-ho truant officer who is on the trail of his young school skippers with the determination of a cop on America's Most Wanted, grows increasingly silly, too.
The saving grace is Mary-Kate and Ashley (who are fraternal twins, not identical), and who play sisters, though judging from their first scenes you would not at first guess that they even live in the same house. Having played since age 9 months on TV's Full House and then in a string of popular girl adventures on video, Mary-Kate and Ashley are seasoned troupers and yet maintain a genuine naturalness.
In New York Minute, Mary-Kate's Roxy is a rock 'n' roll grunge artist wannabe who dumps school to hang out at a band's video shoot in Manhattan in hopes of getting them to see her audition tape. That same day, Ashley's pretty-in-pink straight-A Jane is also on her way to Manhattan from their Long Island home, to present a paper at Columbia University that will determine whether she wins a scholarship to Oxford University.
Two sisters. Cross purposes. A missing computer chip. A missing speech. Spilled coffee. Spilled Slurpee. A ruined dress. A constipated pup. A truant officer. Plus a senator's son who takes an interest in Roxy and a bicyclist who latches onto Jane. The boys -- and other characters -- keep colliding with the girls all across the city as the clock ticks toward Jane's scheduled speech, giving the whole thing an air of urgency.
Along the way, the girls find themselves running through Times Square in terry towels, escaping through a watery sewer, riding a bicycle over cars caught in a traffic jam, and visiting a Harlem spa where they get a complete makeover and a new wardrobe from a sympathetic salon owner, free of charge!
Best is that through their adventures they learn to appreciate each other's passions.
A happy ending? It may be called New York Minute, but the script is sheer Hollywood fantasy.
***
New York Minute
Starring: Ashley Olsen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Eugene Levy, Andy Richter, Jared Padalecki, Jack Osbourne.
Rated: PG, contains sexy situations.
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