From Can’t Buy Me Love to The Woo Woo Kid and Loverboy (Meatballs III
was in there too somewhere), he was the youngster making all the digits
for playing dorky. He essentially played the same geeky schmuck in
every movie – a nerd who inexplicably catches the eye of a beautiful
woman.
In The Woo Woo Kid,
now hitting DVD for the first time, he catches the eye of beautiful
women - plural. He’s 14-year-old Sonny Wisecarver, a youngster who
married two married women in their twenties in the high times of World
War II, and shared tabloid covers with Hitler and D-Day. He, of course,
married them out of love – but nobody much saw it that way.
Phil Alden Robinson’s film doesn’t really belong in the same category as say Can’t Buy Me Love or Loverboy
if only because it’s set in the 50s and is actually a ‘true’ story. As
far as the tone is concerned, it’s the same bag, but the storyline’s as
different to Dempsey’s previous films as could be – mainly because the
almost ‘history lesson’ approach to this one places it in a different
box.
Dempsey is his warm and naive best as Carver, whilst
Beverly D’Angelo and Talia Balsam offer weighty support as his ‘cradle
snatching’ wives. The only person that really let the film down was
Robinson (he recently did The Sum of All Fears)
who seems determined to play the film as more ‘fluff’ than ‘fact’. A
nice combination of both – possibly weighing more on the ‘real life’
facts of the case – might’ve seen it work better.
EXTRASThe DVD looks and sounds about as good as you’d expect a late 80s small-time comedy that nobody much gives a hoot about to look. Conclusion:
Movie 60% Extras: N/A 
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