This week, I had the fortunate chance to watch a movie that I had seen previously in theaters a decade and a half ago, and had already walked away from enjoying, I Love You Phillip Morris (2009). This movie stars Jim Carrey (Steven Rusell) and Ewan McGregor (Phillip Morris) as two incarcerated people who meet in prison, and very quickly fall in love with one another. The core of this film is about how love knows no bounds. A quaint and quirky indie flick from the late 2000s. Watching it in 2026, it does feel a bit dated, but I still have memories of when I saw it upon release in theaters, and of existing in that era of film, so in my opinion, it holds up to this day. 

I Love You Phillip Morris starts with Steven Russell living a near-perfect life where he is a policeman with his wife, Debbie (Leslie Mann) and his daughter, Stephanie. They live in the southeastern United States, but quickly move to Texas after he attempts to contact his mom, who put him up for adoption. The main reason he signed on to the police force was to have access to his birth mom’s records. However, that meeting does not go well for him, and he ends up leaving the force as a result. 

Because of all of this, he moves his family to Texas to try at a new life there. He gets a job working for Sysco, and is still seemingly happy, all the while, he is cheating on his wife with various men. Steven Ruseell is secretly a gay man, living a lie. After one of the meetups with another man, he is on his way home when he gets t-boned by another driver, and is taken away in an ambulance to the hospital. It is in this scene that we see him accept his truth, he proclaims to the EMTs, “I will no longer live a lie! They will call me a faggot!” This is where the movie really begins, everything up to this point was backstory for the viewer.
Steven Russell then leaves his family and moves to Florida to live as a near-flamboyant gay man, living lavishly and dating men. In this montage-esque sequence we see that he is committing various forms of fraud to live the high life. This eventually catches up to him, and he is sent to prison for a long sentence. This is where he meets Phillip Morris and the rest of the movie is able to take off.
Even while in prison, we as the viewer get to see the workings of Steven Ruseell and how he finds ways to game the system. He finds a way to transfer himself into Phillip Morris’ room, which is in a different block of the prison, across the yard from his initial room. The love we are shown is explosive and vibrant. They fall quickly for one another, and it seems that Steven Ruseell is too good to be true. Which ultimately ends up being the case sadly. 

Steven is then transferred to a different prison entirely, which puts a halt to their relationship. After three or so months, he is released from prison, but is still playing games with the systems at hand. He pretends to be Phillip Morris’ lawyer to help shorten his sentence and get him out of prison sooner. This ultimately works, because of the way that Steven Ruseell is. 

Once Phillip is out of prison as well, they live a luxurious life. Steven gets a job as a middle man for medical payments, and quickly learns that he can game the system since the money just sits in an account for some time from the payer to the doctor, and starts an investment account that earns interest for said money. This earns him a few million dollars in a short time. He uses this money to buy himself and Phillip a large mansion, fancy cars, and other things only the rich can afford. All the while, he is lying to Phillip about where the money is coming from.
As you can guess, this catches up with Steven, and Phillip finds out, thus leaving him. Steven is again apprehended by the police and sent to prison again. Because Steven opened a “shell” bank account in Phillip’s name, Phillip is also sent to prison again. Steven’s ‘gaming of the system’ knows no bounds, and he fakes having aids to get transferred out of prison into a private care facility, doing anything he can to escape and live the life he dreams of. At this point, Phillip wants nothing to do with Steven, rightfully so. But Steven pretends to be Phillip’s once again to have one more in person meeting with him. Phillip is apprehensive about this as he knows Steven at this point, and knows that he is a liar, and a thief. Their last meeting does not go well, and ends with Phillip crying. The movie then ends, reminding us that this was all based on a real story. 

The real Steven was arrested again while trying to secure Phillip’s release. Steven ends up receiving an unprecedented life sentence for his crimes in 1998. Phillip Morris was eventually released in 2006. 

This movie was driven by love, and in many ways tells a heartfelt love story. Despite one of the main characters not being true to themselves, which is something that is important to a lot of movies.  The character that Jim Carey takes on is a complicated one deep down, but simple on the surface. He’s trying to live a life of fantasy that is unobtainable for someone in his circumstance. The love he has for Phillip Morris is genuine, and real. But he doesn’t know how to handle those feelings. He does the only thing he’s known his entire life, since his childhood of being adopted, aka abandoned by his birth mother: survive. 

The characterization in this movie is its key; Steven is a deeply complicated individual living in a world that is meant to chokehold and oppress those people like him. He is a gay man in the south, and while that is not a glaring issue within this work, you can see that it is a glaring issue within his character on many levels. All Steven seeks is happiness, but his means to get to the ends of that happiness are far from appropriate. When you as the viewer remember this is all based on a very real story about very real people, you feel a certain way for the characters. As someone who often feels lost in this world that we exist in, I feel deeply for characters like Steven Russell. He played to his outs, albeit not in a legal or acceptable way, but he tried. And damned if we don’t try in this life we’re dealt. 

This movie has you caring about the main characters in ways that you ultimately, upon reflection, shouldn’t, due to the drive and heartfeltedness of them. Steven Russell is not a good person, and is often selfish, and idiotic. But you as the viewer still can relate to his plight, and the love he has for Phillip Morris. Your heart breaks for the outcome of Phillip, having to face more prison time for the actions of Steven, but you can still, on some level, relate to why Steven acted the way he did. 

4 mallards/5

-Seann 

Twins (1988) is a movie that , one would have to imagine, began as merely an off-the-wall idea that somehow came to fruition, much to the joy of its viewership. I think the production meeting probably went like this: 

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we made a movie in which the two actors most unlike each other are actually brothers?”

“Yeah, we could get Danny DeVito and his brother can be…uh…”

“Arnold!”

And the rest is history. As it turns out, the idea is actually not half bad. The basic premise of the film is easy to explain to people, and the plot of the movie, if we can call it really a plot, is just unobtrusive enough to lead to hijinks and jokes and mischief without falling into the trap of something like, say, Holmes and Watson (2018). To continue with that comparison, the greatest success of Twins is that the charisma and chemistry between Mr. DeVito and Mr. Schwarzenegger is palpable. Both of them are pretty good actors and really play into their characters. I think each of them, in the real world, are somewhat like their characters as well. This is where Holmes and Watson was such an utter failure – there was no chemistry between Mr. Riley and Mr. Ferrell. 

To stick with the actors for a moment longer, although shifting attention to the supporting cast, there are some real talents here. Chief among them being, of course, Kelly Preston (may she rest in peace), who not only has some incredibly clever one-liners (and delivers them with finesse and gusto) but also looks absolutely incredible while doing so. Other standouts include Marshall Bell as a psychotic hitman, and a guest appearance by none other than Jeff Beck. The performances across the board in this movie are believable, funny, and appropriate. Some of this praise can be directed instead towards the script, which will also get its flowers. 

One of the other joys of this film is the setting and sets. This is a serious immersion into the 1980’s. The costumes, the cars, the slang, the action – all of it is so very nostalgic 80’s that it’s like walking into a time machine. This isn’t the first film from the 80’s that we’ve reviewed, and it certainly won’t be the last, but there’s something unique about the look of this movie. Whether the 80’s were actually, in reality, as the movie shows them will have to be up to someone else to decide, as the 80’s are before my time. If the 80’s were actually like they are in this movie, I’d love to go back.

The last thing for which I’ll praise this film before I cover the shortcomings (of which there are a couple) is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Twins is not trying to use humor to point out some dramatic truth about humanity or society, and it’s not trying to wow the viewer with cinematography or choreography. It doesn’t attempt to transcend the bounds of what it is – an honestly quite funny idea for a film with a solid script, great acting, and a predictable but engaging plot. There’s not much else one could ask for out of a movie  – it knows what it is, and it does those things to the best of its ability. 

The biggest downside of this film is the pacing. The introductory scenes are pretty great, up to and including when the brothers meet for the first time. When the plot really kicks off regarding the “merchandise” in the Cadillac, and the quartet hits the road to Texas, things start to seriously slow down. There are some highlight scenes that are exciting and are paid-off by things earlier in the movie – such as Julius and Marnie’s budding romance, Jullius and Vince contacting the scientist that made them, and Vince and Julius going shopping. Outside of these moments, some of the magic is lost. We’ve established that these are two brothers that are very different, and we have established what they’re looking for and what they’re trying to do, but we haven’t established how those two aspects interact positively or negatively. The scenes where the brothers’ relationship is developed are great, and the scenes where the plot is furthered are great, but unfortunately, there are scenes other than these. 

I might not be doing a great job of explaining this phenomenon, but if you watch the movie you’ll see what I mean. There are scenes that just are not that exciting. They might be important, but not exactly exciting. The plot speeds up rapidly towards the end as well. The movie’s runtime is about an hour and 45 minutes, which is great for a film like this that’s mainly meant to entertain, but I get the distinct impression that in order to cut down on the film, they more or less jumped to the end before its time. It sounds strange to say about a movie whose entire point is that these two brothers are completely different, yet the same, but I wish this movie had more scenes about how the two brothers are completely different, yet the same.

At the conclusion of my reviews, I like to generally give some ideas about what the general population thinks of the film. I’ll do that here, too, but with a little commentary of my own, having read into some viewer comments. Twins (1988) has a middling score of 3.0 out of 5 on Letterboxd, a score of 6.2 out of 10 on IMDB, and a shocking RottenTomatoes score of 43%. This is the first time that my score for a movie will be significantly higher than the general consensus, so I feel I need to defend my rating a little bit. From what I can tell, the biggest issue that viewers have with this movie is that it is all premise (Devito and Arnold as brothers) and no substance. I think that’s wrong, not because I disagree entirely with the assessment, but because the reviewers themselves are putting too much stock into the premise. If this was a movie about two brothers who are actually identical. It would be certainly less funny, but still function as a film. Reviewers are acting as if the movie can be reduced to my earlier dialogue at the start of this review. They EXPECT more to happen in this movie than what does, and the entire reasoning for this expectation is BECAUSE they are drawn so much to the premise. Just because the genesis of the idea is outlandish does not mean the rest of the movie must be. 

All in all, Twins (1988) is a fun flick. Not something to be watched with an artistic eye, or with pen and paper in hand, but something that requires a bit more effort than having it on in the background while you cook dinner. This would be a great film for a date night, or to watch amongst friends. Watching it multiple times in a row (as I did…) can reveal some of the less-than-stellar aspects of its storytelling, but it is far from the disaster that some portray it as online. 

3.5 mallards/5

–Maxwell