It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Splitting Heirs starred and written by Eric Idle and also featuring fellow Python John Cleese, it tells of a baby who was destined to become duke who got left behind in a restaurant due to the forgetfulness of his parents. Due to convenience, the parents chose another baby to be their son and he grows up to become Rick Moranis. Meanwhile the baby that his parents did not find grows up as Tommy Patel played by Eric Idle. It seemed somewhat too convenient for this movie that Tommy becomes friends with Henry played by Moranis without knowing about his real history beforehand. However once he knew that the dukedom was supposed to be his and everything with it, Tommy goes about getting it back by killing Henry. However things don't quite according to his plans which includes the attack of his conscience. It not a bad comedy film from Idle but the one thing that I did not like it about it is Catherine Zeta-Jones' character Kitty as she was rather too two-faced for my liking.

Interesting movie. It is an English Comedy and seems to be John Cleese first appearance for the credits say "introducing John Cleese" yet the movie seems to have been made after the Monty Python movies. Whatever the reason it is not really important.Splitting Heirs is really nothing more than a stereotype comedy movie. At the start two people meet and in an unfortunate accident, then a duke dies. What ends up happening is that one of the two people is the legal heir and he becomes duke. In reality, the other person really is the duke because the babies were switched at birth (which is sort of covered in the movie). As such, one guy starts running around trying to kill the other, but when he believes he has killed him, he really hits a guilt trip. That is where the twist starts.The comedy of this movie is very much a comedy of errors. It deals with someone trying to kill somebody else and always missing his target. It is this that takes the major part of the movie. There is also a bit of slapstick, a bit of sexual humour, a bit of linguistic humour which includes funny names, and just unusual twists that have a comic revelation. Being a British movie with two actors from Monty Python (Eric Idle and John Cleese) there is also a poke at the French.John Cleese, now he is cool. He plays a lawyer, in fact he plays quite a mad lawyer. In the law firm his office is in the basement which means he's pretty bad (and pretty cheap). He sees an opportunity and he takes it. He decides that he wants to become the duke's lawyer but the real duke wants nothing of it. Unfortunately, Cleese is just too stupid to realise this.Splitting Heirs is okay but not fantastic. I didn't find it that funny, except for the beginning; that to me is a sign of a not too good comedy movie. The comedy is based entirely on trying to kill the false duke and this gets dull after awhile. The sexual innuendos are non existent, namely because they are just more blatant. I don't find a mother trying to sleep with her son even though she doesn't know at all funny. John Cleese is good and if you like slapstick, then okay, but honestly, you could probably waste your time better elsewhere.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first. Eric Idle (born 1943) is a generation too old to play a young man born around 1967. Although Idle looks relatively youthful for a fifty-year-old, there is no way he could be the son of Barbara Hershey (born 1948). Even Rick Moranis (born 1953) is rather too old for his role.Bad news over. The good news is that, miscasting apart, "Splitting Heirs" is excellent, one of the best of the "post-Python" comedies produced by the various Pythons after their last effort as a team, "The Meaning of Life". Idle not only played the leading character, Tommy Patel, but also wrote the script. He also wrote the theme song, "Someone Stole My Baby", a witty pastiche of sixties pop which puns on the differences between song lyrics and the spoken language. In the dialect of English used by pop lyricists it is taken for granted that "baby" means "girlfriend" (or "boyfriend" if the singer is female), although it very rarely has this meaning in the dialect spoken by everyone else. So the words "someone stole my baby" in a song would normally mean "another man has seduced my girl", but here Idle gives them their absolutely literal meaning of "someone has kidnapped my young child". Which is exactly what happens in the film.In the 1960s the infant heir to the Dukedom of Bournemouth was accidentally left in a restaurant by his absent-minded hippie parents and, apparently, found a few days later in a London telephone kiosk. Tommy (the adopted son of a British-Asian family) begins to suspect that he is the long-lost heir and that the current Duke, Henry, may in fact be a changeling. He consults a crooked lawyer named Raoul P. Shadgrind who advises him that he has little chance of establishing a claim to the title while the Duke is still alive. If, however, the Duke were to die things might be easier, so Tommy sets out to kill Henry (even though the two are supposedly friends). A further complication is that Tommy and Henry are in love with the same girl, Kitty.Several of the post-Python films were influenced by the famous Ealing comedies, and "Splitting Heirs" is clearly a modern version of "Kind Hearts and Coronets". In the Ealing film Dennis Price plays the poor relation of an aristocratic family who plots to inherit the title by murdering eight other heirs who stand ahead of him in the line of succession. (A similar plot line was used in an episode of the early seventies television series "The Persuaders"). Tommy only has one person standing between him and the title, but unlike Price's character he proves a singularly inept assassin, and several attempts on Henry's life misfire without Henry even being aware that someone is trying to kill him.Had this film been made in 1973 rather than 1993 Eric Idle would have been the ideal choice as Tommy. His fellow-Python John Cleese gives an excellent supporting performance as the shyster lawyer Shadgrind, a man who proves even keener on murder than his client, who eventually sees the error of his ways. There is a clear Pythonic reference when Cleese says to Idle "Say no more!", a line famously used by Idle himself (to Terry Jones) in the "Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink" sketch.Henry was educated in America, and Moranis plays him as the stereotypical American as seen by the British- loud, brash, hyper-active and unconventional, zooming round his ancestral stately home on roller-skates. In 1993, following the popularity of "The Darling Buds of May", the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones was well known in Britain but had not yet become a major international star. Here, however, as Kitty, the love-interest of both Tommy and Henry, she shows her gift for comedy that was later to stand her in good stead in Hollywood films like "Intolerable Cruelty" and "Chicago".Hershey plays the Dowager Duchess, a former model, as a glamorous, sex-mad seductress. Her real name is Lucinda, but she modelled under the name "Available Space". I wonder if Idle was having some fun at Hershey's own expense; in her youth she was regarded as something of a Hollywood wild child, and acted for a time under the name "Barbara Seagull". She also christened her son, in good hippie fashion, "Free"; Tommy's full name is Thomas Henry Butterfly Rainbow Peace. There is a running joke about Lucinda's persistent but unsuccessful attempts to seduce Tommy, not knowing he is in fact her son.Black comedy can be a difficult subject to get right. Done well, it can be tasteless but hilarious; done badly, it is merely tasteless. The Pythons, however, were all very skilled comics, and Idle manages to hit the right balance between bad taste and hilarity. There are some great lines such as "I'm bi-sexual. Whenever I want to have sex, I have to buy it", or "Sex before the wedding is so much better without the groom". This is one of the most side-splitting British comedies of the nineties. 8/10

The movie reminded me of one of my favorites - Kind Hearts and Coronets - except instead of killing several relatives in the line of succession as Alec Guiness's character did, Eric Idle's character was trying several methods to kill one. Also, Eric Idle strongly resembled every ancestor in the Duke's portrait gallery much like Alec Guiness looked just like every member of his family in Kind Hearts and Coronets (since he was playing all the roles). John Cleese was so funny describing how the new Duke could meet with an accident and then listing possible accidents which included poison mixed with scotch to disguise both the taste and cause of death. Eric Idle's character was very likable, and even though he's much older than Kitty, his smile and charm made them seem like they could be a couple. The whole cast was all star - Cleese, Idle, Barbara Hershey, Catherine Zeta Jones, Rick Moranis, and like Monty Python movies, there are loads of quotable quotes.