1. Continuity was not such a Holy Grail for the filmmakers, it seems. Leading man Tom Cruise’s hair is all over the map — length-wise — within the first ten minutes. And the other errors might be less visible but they are there and they could make for a very painful-the-next-morning drinking game.
2. Brian Flanagan’s (Cruise) obsession with making a million doesn’t translate into anything beyond the business plan he submits as a class project. The narrative arc–such as it may be–does not involve his evolving skill as a businessman. He does not get better at finding his flugelbinder, i.e., the thing that will make him rich.
3. Kelly Lynch had some killer abs during the making of this movie.
4. “A guy lays down a dare, you gotta take it.” I have no doubt that countless lives have been ruined if they have been lived by this code.
5. Before there was, “you had me at hello,” there was, “I bet I can spook you.”
6. A fun soundtrack can totally make a goofy movie seem better.
7. My favourite one of Coughlin’s (Bryan Brown) Laws: “Anything else is always something better.”
8. In his final poem Flanagan was kinda sexist when he worried that he wouldn’t be able to pass on his business if his wife and he had a daughter.
9. Uncle Frank (Gerry Bamman) from Home Alone and Jim Walsh (James Eckhouse) from Beverly Hills, 90210 play tourists in Jamaica — not as those characters though — in this movie. Elisabeth Shue’s brother Andrew also makes an appearance.
10. This movie, and Taxi Driver, make me nostalgic for a New York I have never known.