Outstanding!

“Corky Romano” is one of the greatest comedies ever made. Not only is the foundation for the humor as stable as the lincoln memorial, the execution of all the jokes and physical slapstick seems to be the work of M.I.T students. I’m guessing the only thing more un-predictable than this movie would be an asteroid attack that kills off the human race.

Chris Kattan, who is hilarious on “Saturday Night Live”, plays the “bumbling and naive” (there are many more great helpful adjectives from the back of the box) veterinarian-in-training Corky Romano. Corky happens to be the son of an ailing mob boss (Peter Falk, who is great ) who is under investigation from the FBI. Of course, Corky doesn’t fit into the family business as well as Pops would have hoped, but now he has a mission for his bumbling misfit son: go undercover as an FBI agent and recover all evidence against the Romano crime family. Naturally, this will create a fish-out-of-water scenario in which Corky will be hopelessly out-of-touch with the macho professionalism of his fellow agents, yet will somehow fool them into thinking he is an expert marksman fluent in five different languages while, at the same time, winning them over with his fun-loving spirit. How wonderful!

I’ll admit to laughing so hard I woke my neighbors during “Corky Romano”, and I probably would have laughed even more had I been high. The movie is so great and wonderful it makes one hope for a feature-length version of Kattan’s Mr. Peepers sketch on “SNL”. Or perhaps a Mango movie. Peter Berg and Chris Penn play Corky’s mobster brothers, while Richard Roundtree is his FBI superior. Grizzled old Fred Ward is in the movie too. As the credits start to roll, you can almost hear the footsteps of these people bolting to the bank to cash their cheques and start working on a second “Corky Romano”. The grandparents will love it!