“Seems Like Old Times” is another one of those near-misses that leaves a movie critic in a quandary. It’s a funny movie, and it made me laugh out loud a lot, but in the final analysis it just didn’t quite edge over the mystical line into success.
This Christmas has had a lot of movies like that: “Stir Crazy” and “Any Which Way You Can” didn’t quite make it, and “Nine to Five” and “Flash Gordon” sneaked in on their fringe benefits. Only “Raging Bull” and “Popeye” are clearly worth the trip out into the raging blizzard.
And yet I found myself wanting to like “Seems Like Old Times,” and wishing it were better, because the good parts were good enough to hold out the promise for more. The movie is Neil Simon’s attempt at one of those 1940s-style screwball comedies with lots of surprise entrances and hasty exits and people hiding under the bed. It would be hard to improve on the casting (Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase and Charles Grodin). And there are a couple of really funny, sustained sequences.
The movie opens with Chevy Chase, a divorced writer, being abducted by a pair of bank robbers who want him to hold the gun and present the note to the teller. He does and on the way out of the bank he inadvertently poses for a perfect snapshot taken by the spy camera over the door. A statewide alarm goes out; he’s wanted for bank robbery.
That causes political complications, because his first wife (Goldie Hawn) is now married to the district attorney (Charles Grodin), and the state governor is considering Grodin for Attorney General. It causes even more complications when Chevy Chase, on the lam, throws himself on the mercy of Goldie Hawn and she tries to hide him in the spare room over the garage.
