The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) Review

In 2087 a man runs a nightclub on the moon. The mob wants to buy it. He will not sell. That is the film, and it is delivered at feature length with a robot bodyguard and a lunar car chase.

The 2 is for a handful of competent production elements and for Randy Quaid, who is doing something genuinely funny as a malfunctioning android and appears to be in a better film than everybody else. Nothing else here works at any level.

What makes it useful is the arithmetic. Somebody attached a star to a premise, and the star’s attachment converted a small idea into a hundred million dollar production without anybody reassessing the idea.

A Four Million Dollar Idea

The concept is a nightclub owner refusing to sell to gangsters, relocated to the moon. That is a serviceable premise for a modest comedy and it has no scale in it whatsoever.

Nothing about the story requires a hundred million dollars. The lunar setting is a backdrop, the science fiction is decorative, and the plot could be staged in a bar in New Jersey with no alteration to a single character motivation.

So the money bought sets, effects and a moon that the story does not use. A lunar surface pursuit exists because the film is set on the moon, not because the plot needed a pursuit, and the audience can feel that distinction even without naming it.

That mismatch is the whole diagnosis. Scale has to be demanded by the story. Applied to a story that does not want it, it produces a film that looks expensive and feels small, which is a worse outcome than looking cheap.

The Star Was the Greenlight

Warner Bros. approved it because Eddie Murphy was attached, at a point when Murphy was among the most reliably profitable performers in American film.

That is a rational decision on its own terms and it skipped a step. The attachment answered the question of whether the film could be sold and was treated as answering whether it should be made, and those are separate questions with separate evidence.

Nobody in the chain appears to have asked whether the screenplay justified the budget, whether the concept could sustain a running time, or whether an audience existed for a lunar gangster comedy in 2002.

The failure was also known in advance. The film sat unreleased for a considerable period after completion, which is a studio signaling that it has seen what it paid for and is deciding how quietly to dispose of it.

A delayed release is the clearest signal in the business. Nobody sits on a film they believe in, because interest decays and marketing costs recur, and a picture held back for months has been assessed internally and found wanting by the people with the most to lose from saying so.

Murphy Is Not the Problem

He is doing what the script asks, which is to be charming and slightly exasperated for ninety-five minutes, and there is nothing in the writing for him to work with.

The comparison is instructive. In Beverly Hills Cop or Trading Places, Murphy is the fastest and most dangerous person in every room, and the comedy comes from watching an institution fail to contain him. Here he is a proprietor with a reasonable grievance about a business sale.

That is the misuse. A performer whose gift is disruption was cast as the stable center of a plot, surrounded by people less interesting than he is, and asked to react.

Randy Quaid gets the one part written for a comic performer and does something with it. Bruno the android is out of date, over-literal and violent at inappropriate moments, and every time he is on screen the film briefly has a joke.

Rosario Dawson and Joe Pantoliano are also here, both early enough in their careers that this was a step up on paper, and both given nothing. A hundred million dollar production employed a genuinely capable cast and wrote parts for none of them, which is its own kind of waste and easy to overlook next to the budget.

Four and a Half Million Dollars

About a hundred million in production against roughly four and a half million worldwide. That is a recovery of somewhere near four percent, which puts it among the very worst results ever recorded for a film at that budget.

For comparison, the other famous disasters on this page recovered far more. Heaven’s Gate took three and a half million against forty-four. The Postman took twenty to thirty against eighty. This recovered a twentieth of its cost.

The distribution tells the rest. It opened in August, the month studios use to bury things, against a visibly minimal campaign, and disappeared within a fortnight.

Warner Bros. spent a hundred million dollars making it and declined to spend meaningfully on selling it. That is a rational decision and a public admission at once, taken by people who had read the room months earlier and concluded that the cheapest option remaining to them was to absorb the whole loss quietly and never mention the picture again in any context, which is broadly what the studio has managed to do ever since.

The consequence for Murphy was real. He remained employable and the run of the following decade is visibly different, with a shift toward family comedy and voice work that had already begun and accelerated afterward.

There is no reappraisal coming for this one. Several films on this page are better than their reputations. This is a film with a thin idea, a misused star, an unnecessary budget and no compensating quality anywhere in it.

That is unusual and it is why the film is useful. Most notorious failures have a defender somewhere making a reasonable case, and twenty years of repertory screenings and streaming availability have produced almost nobody arguing for this one. A consensus that survives that long with no dissent is generally correct.

The Useful Lesson

Every other failure on this page has an interesting cause. A director with too much control, a studio mandate about toys, a compressed two-part structure, a release date next to a phenomenon.

This one has the most boring cause available and the most common. A decision was made for a reason that was true, that the star sells tickets, and the reason was allowed to substitute for every other question.

That happens constantly and almost never this visibly. Most films made on that basis are merely mediocre and recover their costs, and the process that produced them goes unexamined because the numbers were adequate.

So the value of this film is diagnostic. It is what the ordinary process looks like when every safeguard is skipped at once and the result is put in front of an audience that had no interest in it.

Should you watch Pluto Nash?

No. This is the one film on this page with nothing to recover, a small idea inflated to a hundred million dollars because a star said yes, and its only value now is as the clearest available demonstration of what happens when nobody asks the second question.

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