"Actor: Bernard Barrow"

• The Survivors | DVD | (15/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  At the height of urban paranoia and the birth of survivalist movement in the 1980s, director Michael Ritchie decided to team Robin Williams and Walter Matthau in The Survivors. Talk about an odd couple; yet it actually might have worked, with Matthau's hang-dog deadpan and Williams' manic energy, were it not for a limp script by Michael Leeson. Williams and Matthau play two victims of Reaganomics, unemployed acquaintances who witness a robbery and identify one of the participants to the police, an act that turns them into targets for the robber in question who comes looking for them. Williams' response: become a one-man arsenal and join a training camp for militant survivalists. But the comedy is neither sharp enough nor sufficiently smart to pull it off; Matthau is the calm centre while Williams' comedy rockets all around him, to surprisingly little effect. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com