The Year of the Comet (1992)

Margaret Harwood (Penelope Ann Miller) works for her father, a seller of fine wines.  During one particular wine tasting, Oliver Plexico (Tim Daly) asks if she has any Budweiser in the back.  Shocked by his lack of culture, she continues her work.  Unhappy to be little more than a servant in the family business, she demands and gets the job of surveying a wine cellar in Scotland.  To her utter amazement, she finds a bottle of Lafite 1811, bottled in the year of the comet; it is worth a fortune.  Thus begins a series of thefts and recoveries as multiple parties attempt to take possession of the bottle.  Oliver, who appears to be a fixer for one of the men at the earlier wine tasting, is her initially unwanted ally but later lover.  Yeah, this is something of a romantic comedy of the Romancing the Stone variety.  Though fun, it falls far short of that bar.  Tim Daly plays a combination of the comic oaf and the supreme jack-of-all-trades.  His trademark line is "I never said I wasn't ..."  It was okay to start but when he got to "I never said I didn't go to MIT" he had gone too far.  With his final reveal, it becomes hard to understand why he is chasing Maggie.  Love is blind.

 

This 1992 movie marks the final appearance of Louis Jourdan.  He plays the most durable of the villains but not particularly threatening.  In fact, the threat level of the villains drops as the movie progresses, a reverse of what one would expect.

 

Mindless popcorn fun.  Thumbs up.