The film’s setup has a nice energy to it. We meet the Dream Team one at a time: Billy (Michael Keaton), fast-talking, jazzed-up and possibly violent; Henry (Christopher Lloyd), professorial and obsessive-compulsive; Jack (Peter Boyle), who has messianic tendencies, and Albert (Stephen Furst), who doesn’t talk to people. Separately, they’re not able to function in society (although the Keaton character is no crazier than numbers of my friends). But together, they seem to forge a composite personality, each one contributing according to his abilities and taking according to his needs.
Dennis Boutsikaris plays the psychiatrist who has all four men in his encounter group, and it’s his idea to take them all out for a day at the ballpark. They set out in the morning, high in spirits, but their troubles begin when Albert develops a desperate need to answer a call of nature. The doctor pulls into a gas station, Albert runs into an alley, the doctor follows and inadvertently witnesses a murder. He’s knocked senseless and later taken to a hospital, and the four patients are left to their own devices.
It’s at this point that the movie takes a fatal turn toward the conventional. An ambitious, daring film would have seriously asked itself what might happen next. What experiences and adventures might these four men really have? And then it would follow them, together or separately, down the byways of city life, as each encountered reality through his own special sieve.
“The Dream Team” is not ambitious and daring, unfortunately, and so it plugs us into a preassembled murder plot involving some bad cops.
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