Stick with the original

Suffering the fate of most Hollywood remakes of Francis Veber scripts, 1985's dismal The Tall Man With One Red Shoe doesn't just change the color scheme from the French original The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe but throws out most of the jokes as well, toning down the already pretty innocuous original for the perceived prejudices of a mainstream American audience who stayed at home in droves anyway. A young Tom Hanks seems all at sea in the barely-defined lead, Lori Singer overdoes the icy professionalism to zombie-like extremes as his leading lady while a capable supporting cast (Jim Belushi, Charles Durning, Edward Herrmann, Carrie Fisher, Tom Noonan, David Ogden Stiers) have too little to do and even less of it close to funny under Stan Dragoti's leaden direction that misses what few comic opportunities remain in Robert Klane's script through lazy staging. Only Dabney Coleman's ruthlessly ambitious CIA bigwig makes much of an impression, and he's just diligently ploughing the well-furrowed field of arrogant institutional SOBs that were his 80s stock-in-trade. Not so much obnoxiously bad, more utterly pointless, it's a film that really seems to have no reason to exist or be watched.