Every month, Amazon Prime Video adds dozens of movies to its ever-expanding library.
The streamer has outdone itself in July by adding modern hits and retro classics from every genre you can think of.
One new film that sticks out from the rest is A Fish Called Wanda, a 1988 comedy that has an impressive 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Very few movies get that kind of score, which should tell you how good — and funny — it is. Here are a few reasons why you should stream it this July.
‘A Fish Called Wanda’ Is a Comedy Masquerading as a Heist Flick
Despite its title, A Fish Called Wanda isn’t about maritime pursuits; instead, it’s a classic crime caper where everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong. It begins with London gangster George (Tom Georgeson) successfully stealing some diamonds with the help of his crew: girlfriend Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her Anglophobe brother Otto (Kevin Kline) and stuttering getaway driver Ken (Michael Palin).
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What George doesn’t know is that Wanda and Otto aren’t siblings at all — they’re lovers, and they call the cops on George so they can have the loot all to themselves. What Wanda and Otto don’t know — and soon find out to their dismay — is that George lied to them about where the loot is, so they can’t take it and can’t ask George where it is since he’s in jail.
Determined to get the jewels without letting George know they double-crossed him, they come up with a plan to seduce George’s lawyer, Archie (John Cleese), so they can find the jewels and leave Great Britain. Complications ensue when Wanda begins to fall for Archie, and Otto becomes consumed with jealousy.
A Fish Called Wanda has a lot of plot, but somehow, it never feels like it’s difficult to follow. Director Charles Crichton directs with an efficient, invisible hand, moving the story along at a perfect pace that allows room for nuance and laughs without slacking. This is a movie that
really moves — just when you’re done digesting the last plot development, a new one springs up. A Fish Called Wanda is the rare comedy that, even if you strip it of all its jokes, still works as a pure heist movie. But why would anyone want to do that?
It Features an Oscar-Winning Performance
A Fish Called Wanda’s other impressive achievement is that it’s the rare comedy that actually won an acting Oscar. Kline received an Academy Award for his performance as Otto in 1989, beating out competitors like Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Alec Guinness, and a young River Phoenix. It was deserved, though, as Kline has never been better as the hypnotically narcissistic — and hilariously stupid — Otto.
The key to Kline’s performance is that Otto thinks he’s the smartest person in the room when the exact opposite is true. Wanda tolerates it because he’s good in the sack, but even she has her limits. In one of the great takedowns in cinema history, she reveals to him just how dumb he really is.
Only an actor like Kline can sell Otto’s self-delusion as comedy, but also make it dangerous, too. As Otto frequently states throughout the movie, he doesn’t like to be called “stupid,” so when the inevitable happens and someone does, they’re nearly killed. Kline’s Otto is a true original — a sleazy psychopath who wants nothing more than to be seen as a rational intellectual. A lot of the movie’s laughs stem from Otto’s overreactions and how Kiline conveys them through an impressive mixture of verbal and physical comedy.
It’s One of the Funniest Movies Ever Made
It’s not just Kline who is superb — Curtis, Cleese and Palin are also top-notch and each has multiple moments to showcase their comedic skills. Curtis draws on her ‘80s sex symbol status as a weapon Wanda uses to charm all the men in the movie, who are all helpless to her charms. But Wanda herself has a weakness — she loves it when men speak to her in a foreign language, so when Cleese begins to speak to her in Italian and then Russian, she loses all of her inhibitions.
Palin’s Ken is given his own side story where he has to assassinate an old lady who witnessed George steal the jewels. He isn’t very good at it, and he keeps failing to kill her — and instead accidentally snuffs out each of her three cute dogs. This causes Ken particular anguish since he’s an animal lover, and the movie keeps cutting back to this failed assassin attending multiple dog funerals that he can’t help causing.
‘A Fish Called Wanda’ Is So Funny, It Might Just Kill You — Seriously
I could go on and on — there’s the scene with Archie being found naked by his neighbors as he attempts to seduce Wanda and there’s another sequence when Archie’s wife interrogates a trespassing Otto about why exactly he’s in her home. And then there’s the madcap finale, which combines a breathless pursuit to an airport that’s straight out of a rom-com and an apparent death by streamroller that’s more appropriate for a Looney Tunes cartoon than a British comedy.
But what else do you expect from a movie that’s so funny, it caused the death of one of its viewers? While Ole Bentzen officially died from heart fibrillation, it was due to an extended period of laughter while he was watching the movie.
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I don’t think you’ll die while watching A Fish Called Wanda, but even if you did, there are worse ways to go. Even though it’s almost 40 years old, the comedy is still as sharp and funny as it was in 1988. If you’re an Amazon Prime Video subscriber, there’s no better movie to stream this month than a film that combines grand larceny, high comedy, sweet romance and an attempted murder by sticking two French fries in someone’s nose.