MouseHunt

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MouseHunt
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Produced by Bart Brown,
Bruce Cohen,
Tony Ludwig
Written by Adam Rifkin
Starring Nathan Lane
Lee Evans
Christopher Walken
William Hickey
Distributed by Dreamworks
Release date(s) December 19, 1997
Running time 96 min.
Language English
Budget $38 million
IMDb profile

MouseHunt is a 1997 slapstick/black comedy film directed by Gore Verbinski, scored by Alan Silvestri and released by DreamWorks SKG.

Starring Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, it tells the story of two brothers who, upon inheriting an antique house, must rid it of a troublesome mouse which comically foils their efforts to exterminate it.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Lars (Lee Evans) and Ernie (Nathan Lane) Smuntz are two "down on their luck" brothers, who are the sons of a wealthy, deceased string manufacturer (William Hickey).

The movie opens with their father's funeral, where things quickly go awry. As the brothers carry their father's casket down the church stairs, they begin to argue about whether Lars' semi-gray suit is black enough for his father's funeral. This results in Lars' angrily jerking at the poorly manufactured coffin, causing the handle to come off and send the coffin thundering down the church stairs. Accompanied by shrieks from the crowd, the coffin hits a parked limousine and the corpse flies out of it and into an open manhole cover.

Lars and Ernie learn that their father bequeathed to them his outdated string factory along with a number of personal effects to the tune of a box of Cuban cigars, a spoon collection, a ceramic egg, and a crumbling old mansion burdened with bank debt, which their father used to to pay the workers of his unprofitable string enterprise.

In contrast to his father, who in his heydays was a fairly successful string merchant, Ernie is a high-class, hotshot chef, who never liked the string business. His father's inheritance spells disaster for him when he brings the box of cigars with him into the kitchen of his restaurant, Chez Ernie. Unbeknownst to Ernie, a cockroach had stowed away in the box, and, upon crawling out of it, made its way to one of his opulent dishes ready for serving. The local mayor visits the restaurant that night amidst a throng of reporters eager to interview him on the eve of his re-election campaign. Instead they witness and document the mayor accidentally eating the cockroach and subsequently dying of heart failure (even after spitting out the head).

With his restaurant closed, Ernie finds employment in a seamy little fast food restaurant, Rimpy's, where he meets Lars who had just been thrown out of his home by his temperamental wife, April. Lars, who shared his father's dedication to the string industry and had vowed to his dying father that he would never sell Smuntz' String, had refused to sell the factory to two seedy business types, thus enraging April. For a while the two brothers wander the streets until they are reminded by a cake in store window that they do have a home—their father's old estate.

During a noisy and uneasy night in the decrepit building, the two brothers fortuitously discover the house's blueprints (dated 1876) in its attic, leading to the discovery that the house is a long-lost architectural marvel possibly worth millions.

However, the house does already have an occupant—an intelligent and tenacious little mouse. Fearing an incident similar to that of the aforementioned cockroach, Ernie decides to get rid of the mouse before he and Lars renovate and auction off the house. They try every possible way to get rid of the little animal, from using a vacuum, which explodes due to it being inserted in a sewage pipe, to a vicious overgrown tiger-like domestic cat nicknamed Catzilla, which the mouse cunningly lures into a dumbwaiter and then chewing through the cables, to a huge mousetrap array, to the eccentric exterminator Caesar (Christopher Walken) (who gets yanked out of the house by his own equipment), to Lars unknowingly trying to stab the mouse with a barrage of nails from a machine nail gun (Lars was fastening on a wall frame).

Ultimately, during the final encounter with the mouse before the auction, Ernie and Lars use a shotgun to accidentally shoot Caesar's obscured flea-bomb (Ernie was aiming down a hole in the floor that the mouse had gone through) and the explosion makes a massive hole in the floor. It is then that they realize each other's attempts to sell and keep the factory without telling one another (via a message on the answering machine), leading to a heated argument in which Lars snaps throws an orange at Ernie which accidentally knocks the mouse out. Taking their chance, but unable to bring themselves to killing the unconscious creature, they put the mouse in a box, stamp it, and mail it to Fidel Castro, Havana, Cuba.

Unfortunately, during the auction, Lars discovers that the box has been returned to its sender, due to insufficient postage of the item, and that the mouse has chewed its way out.

During their secret antics with the mouse during the auction, Lars and Ernie attempt to flush the mouse from the walls using a garden hose, leading to major wreckage of the house immediately before the culmination of the auction. The bidders are washed out the front door of the house just before it falls down completely. The brothers are left broke... until the mouse discovers how to make string cheese using the old factory. The brothers, with the mouse as their resident cheese tester, establish a successful new business by renovating the old factory.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Trivia

  • The Spanish-language title is "Hard to Hunt" (Duro de Cazar), probably akin to the movies Die Hard (Duro de Matar) and Spy Hard (Duro de Espiar).
  • During the film, there is a somewhat ghostly portrait of their father to which the brothers rarely paid attention. As the film progresses, the portrait changes in both tone and expression to emphasize various moods and scenes as brought forth by the rest of the film.
  • Several different mice had to be used for filming, each specializing in a special maneuver (such as a mouse that was an expert at jumping), according to promotional material. Additionally, a computer-generated image of the mouse was used for several scenes.
  • A reference to The Lion King (1994), in which Nathan Lane played the voice of Timon the Meerkat, can be found in the film. During the reception prior to the auction, Ernie Smuntz bows to a sheik who is seeking to bid for his home and greets him with the words "Hakuna Matata", referencing the song from the film of the same name. Ernie Sabella, who played Timon's warthog friend Pumbaa in The Lion King, also appears as the manager of a kennel who sells the cat.
  • This is the first-ever live-action family film made by DreamWorks.
  • This film is dedicated to William Hickey (plays Smuntz Sr.), who died shortly after filming his part.

[edit] External links

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Films directed by Gore Verbinski