I'll tell you why so serious

i must have seen a different film!!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The two protagonists are charming and show considerable chemistry. There are also some funny scenes and one-liners to enjoy. Sadly all of this is wasted on a disjointed and mediocre little movie. Even the title is strangely misguided. Imagine, say, that you want to make a movie about the violent life and times of Cold War spies, who, occasionaly, meet near a train station in order to exchange coded messages. Would you name the movie after an antique locomotive ? Or after a certain kind of brisket that Stephenson liked to eat ? Or after the first cow killed by a train in the state of Ohio ?Spare a thought for poor Mr. Jourdan, who looks as though he is planning to fire his agent by tying him to a barrel of gunpower.

Take "39 Steps" and add variations on the theme. Here you get two MacGuffins for the price of one. Louis Jordan and his handful of goons are after a youth formula concealed in the label on a bottle of Napoleon's Lafitte 1811 in the secret wine cellar of a castle on the Isle of Skye. The bottle itself, the size of a rather large fire extinguisher, is worth millions of dollars all by itself. A sweet old Scottish lady learns of the bottle and dispatches her son to steal it. "Ken I kill 'em?", he asks. The old lady shakes her head in loving resignation, "Ach, what's a mother to dew? Only if you have tew." The mother and son plot is soon dispensed with and Jourdan becomes the chief villain. The pursuit takes them to the French Riviera for reasons I didn't understand.Penelope Ann Miller is the wine expert who discovers the ancient bottle. She soon picks up a young man as a companion, Tim Daly, who flies helicopters, falls in love with Miller, and owns a billion dollar corporation. Does she reciprocate? Does he get to show off his rock-hard abs? Do the loving pair defeat Jourdan? Does he wind up buying Napoleon's wine? Do they taste the wine at the couple's wedding? Has the wine turned to vinegar? Are you kidding? The screenplay is by William Goldman, a pro who has produced some interesting things among a cloud of clunkers. It was directed by Peter Yates, which is hard to believe because this playful romantic story of wine snobs and thieves is so different from his distinctive work on films like "Bullitt", "Marathon Man," and "Robbery." Even Yates' failure, like "Murphy's War," are exceptional. This story isn't. It's rather like a cartoon.Penelope Ann Miller is a strange actress. There nothing strange about her appearance. She's pretty in a way that some women in the local supermarket are pretty. She's by no means stunning, as, say, somebody with more exotic looks is, like Madeleine Stowe. And she's not extraordinarily sexy, like Elizabeth Hurley or Angelina Jolie. She looks like one of the more attractive girls in a high school chemistry class, the sort that some of the young men with too many pimples dream about before they go to sleep. Her profile is perfect and belongs on an old Medici coin. She's not an outstanding actress, although still competent and affecting.Compared to Tim Daly, she is Eleanora Duse. Daly is brusquely handsome, I guess, in a Magnum PI kind of way, and he's constantly compelled to run around in a bath towel so we see his abs and sinewy limbs and those brachial veins like logs. His performance belongs in a television movie. I didn't like him. I'm staggeringly handsome myself but I'm reminded of a New Yorker cartoon. Two hippos are in the river staring at a gazelle drinking from the bank. One hippo says to the other, "I hate her." Why should Miller wind up in Daly's arms instead of mine? He can pay five million dollars for a bottle of stupid wine and I can't. There is no other rational explanation.But here is Louis Jourdan. He hardly needs that youth serum. He was 70 when this was shot and he looks just fine. His voice is still that Gallic baritone, though perhaps a little gravelly. He's slim, well-dressed, debonair, as usual, and has a chance to overact unconscionably and seems to be enjoying himself. Good for him.There are some picture-postcard shots of Scotland that are very appealing. Less so, the Riviera. But the overall impact of the film is minor, as if everyone -- writer, director, performers, crew -- were all on vacation, breezing along with the breeze. If you don't expect too much, it can distract you for an hour and a half.

"They were your friends!" cries Maggie Harwood when she walks in on the pistol-holding, aged but well preserved Philippe. Lying on the rug behind him are his two, now dead, associates. "Well,' says Philippe, "we weren't that close." Maggie (Penelope Ann Miller) is the heroine in this romantic comedy thriller. While the hero is the overly handsome, strong-jawed and mustachioed Oliver Plexico (Tim Daly), the real sex appeal comes from Philippe as played by 73-year-old Louis Jourdan. This was his last film. While many may remember him as the dashing and love-struck Gaston Lachaille in Gigi, he remains more fondly in my heart as Dr. Arcane in Swamp Thing. Like Dr. Arcane, Philippe is an incorrigibly well-mannered, egocentric and murderous creep. I suspect there are few actors as good as Jourdan who would be willing to semi-sing, while smacking his lips, leering and snapping his fingers, "There are chicks just ripe for some kissin' / And I mean to kiss me a few! / Then those chicks don't know what they're missin' / I got a lot of livin' to do!" Jourdan does it. It's grotesquely funny. The Year of the Comet is all about wine, and especially about an extraordinarily rare bottle of wine, an 1811 Lafite, that was once part of Bonaparte's cellar. In auction it could bring at least a million dollars. Maggie, who works for her father, the wine merchant Sir Mason Harwood (Ian Richardson), is sent to Scotland to appraise an extensive wine collection that Harwood and Company may be commissioned to place in auction. Maggie, who knows almost as much about wine as her father, may be "a funny, over-worked ragamuffin" but she got the assignment from her father by telling him he either gives her this chance to show just how good she is or she's quitting. Now she's knocking on the great oaken door of an isolated Scottish castle to appraise the wine. Unknown to Maggie, she's interrupting the torture of the owner by Philippe and his men. Philippe assures his victim that shoving the hypodermic needle with a certain drug right in the eyeball won't interfere with the man's vision...although it will cause exquisite pain later with each blink. All that we know is that there is a formula Philippe is determined to have. Maggie is taken to the cellar and this is when, brushing off centuries of cobwebs and grime while she looks at these hundreds of encrusted wine bottles, she makes her discovery...the 1811 Lafite. And it's just a short while later that Maggie makes more discoveries. First, she finds Oliver looking for her, the man who prefers beer and calls wine a beverage. She met him at a wine tasting at Harwoods. She and Oliver discover the body of the owner in the wine cellar and they discover Philippe and his crew absconding with the bottle of Lafite. The chase is on! Sometimes Maggie and Oliver chase Philippe. Sometimes he's chasing them. They chase around with cars, motorbikes, helicopters, airplanes and rowboats. They chase scenically through the cold, rocky mountains of Scotland and the warm slopes of the French Rivera. Maggie and Oliver bicker, kiss, bicker, fall in love and bicker. And then they wind up having to listen to Philippe sing "Gotta lotta livin' to do." By now we've realized (this is no spoiler) that this adventure has as much to do with the secret formula and glands as it has to do with wine. Year of the Comet strains to be a Hitchcock romantic thriller. While it doesn't come close it's an engaging, undemanding romp. The script is by William Goldman, a man who knows what he's doing with this sort of thing. Try Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Princess Bride. He works wonders with the clichés he deliberately uses. The direction, however, is a letdown. It's clunky and never lets the script build much steam, either in the chases or in the romance department. I don't know what happened to Peter Yates, but the director of Bullitt, Breaking Away and Eyewitness just doesn't seem engaged. Miller and Daly are attractive enough, although Daly is better at being handsome than at being an amusing speaker of clever lines. Cary Grant needn't worry. The real pleasures of the movie, other than the plot, are Louis Jourdan (now nearly 90 and living in France) and Ian Richardson, such a sly actor. Ian McNeice as one of Philippe's men holds his own. Year of the Comet is amusing fluff, undemanding and a pleasant adventure. I liked it enough to have watched it twice in four years.

As someone who very rarely leaves comments, I just want to say how much I have enjoyed this film. In fact the chances are I would have never watched this film, as its not the type of film I would have ever sought out, nor was I ever a fan of the lead stars.As it was back in 1993 I happened to be working in a video store in which we were only permitted to watch PG films in-store for obvious reasons. This happened to be a new release which I put on one day. Generally I would have put it one and forgot about about it, like so many other films. However I was initially actually attracted to it by its soundtrack, then the fact it was filmed in Britain, made me more interested as at the time I preferred to watch British films, usually for their added realism.Soon I was hooked to the film, although the acting looked a bit corny, I thought it was deliberate, and the dialogue was actually quite funny in its downbeat style. The story made the film a bit like a road movie with both lead characters initially almost irritated by each other. But the adventure they go on as they hunt for the elusive bottle of rare wine.By the end of it I was in love with Penelope Ann Miller and almost whooping at Tim Daly. In fact I liked it so much over the course of 18 months I watched it around 25 times! I wouldn't claim its to everyone's taste, however if you want to watch an enjoyable film for a quiet night in, watch Year Of The Comet, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.