Greedy (1994)

 

Originally Reviewed

Friday January 13, 2006

The title pretty much explains it all.  Kirk Douglas stars as Uncle Joe McTeague, an old grouchy rich dude with a pain in the butt family. Of course if you had family like him, who were waiting for you to die and the only reason they were ever kind to you was because of your money, you'd be pretty grouchy as well. Uncle Joe finds himself a nice hot young British girl and the rest of the family thinks Joe is going to give her all the money, so they become desperate and track down Uncle Joe's favorite nephew Danny (Michael J. Fox) in hopes that Danny will set Uncle Joe straight.

Daniel McTeague is a washed up bowler who has the opportunity to be apart of a great investment, but the problem is he has no money. When he is contacted by his relatives about coming to surprise his Uncle Joe he figures maybe Joe would loan him some money. Once there Danny begins to get sucked into the same greedy game his cutthroat relatives have been playing their entire lives. He begins to do things he never would have thought of doing, all in hopes of gaining his Uncle's fortune. But what Daniel and everyone else doesn't know is that Joe isn't as old and senile as he looks, in fact the jokes all on them.

Greedy is an average comedy with a lot of well known faces, although most of the characters will almost automatically get on your nerves, but both Michael J. Fox and Kirk Douglas give pretty decent performances. The film is fairly basic and predictable, although the last fifteen minutes turn out to be really good, with a couple of surprising twists at the end I didn't see coming.

7/10