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I remember back in 1996 when I saw the trailer and television commercials for LARGER THAN LIFE - just seeing them, I *knew* that this was going to be a box office bomb. And I was right. This was not a case of a good movie being horribly marketed - this was a case of the badness of the movie being shown all too clearly.What went wrong? Well, I think that the main problem of the movie centers around the fact that pretty much all the events of the movie center around an elephant. Elephants are slow creatures, and although they can be trained to perform some tricks, they are still far from being creatures with a real charismatic personality. (Maybe if they got a quicker, wittier creature like a chimpanzee or a dog, it could have worked.) As a result of this movie being weighed down by an enormously ungraceful creature, there is no energy here. Even Murray, who has been quick and funny in other movies, seems overwhelmed. He does well in the opening scene where he's a motivational speaker, because he has *humans* to work with. When he's paired with the elephant, the energy immediately fades away.One question that's never answered in the movie is: Why doesn't Murray's character just hire someone to take the elephant to the west coast? It would be a lot less hassle, and Murray's character wouldn't have to skip his lecture dates. The fact that Murray's character doesn't do the obvious thing helps point out that the premise this script had was deeply flawed even before writing began.
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