Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead (1995)
Directed by Gary Fleder
Written by Scott Rosenberg
Starring Andy Garcia, Christopher Lloyd, Christopher Walken, Gabrielle Anwar

by Alex Rudolph, Contributor

Here's a five-word road to ruin: "I could probably do that."

You see something and you admire it or you think you could do better or you want to repeat its financial success or that thing has captured the zeitgeist and you want to ride its wake to your own career and you decide your version should exist. A hundred people thought some combination of these ideas after Quentin Tarantino broke out and the ones that got there first made Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. Pulp Fiction had its American wide-release on October 14, 1994. Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead hit theaters on December 1, 1995.

"Ruin" is a relative term. It was the director's first film and he went on to make a bunch of mostly anonymous movies and TV episodes. The screenwriter, Scott Rosenberg, was also a first-timer and went on to write things like Con Air, High Fidelity, the Jumanji reboot and Venom. Neither man was pouring gasoline over his potential when they made Denver. The movie itself, though, is the kind of airless "I guess I'll watch it if it's on USA or TNT" passive emptiness that only exists because something more substantial existed first. I don't want to sound too negative, though-- the film is vacant but fun. You can get further than you'd think on borrowed personality.

Miramax copied itself incessantly around this time, sniffing out anything with the personality I'm talking about. The absolutely cursed production company founded by real-life monsters Bob and Harvey Weinstein had a Hannah-Barbera approach to their work. If you make one hit, copy it incessantly until the numbers start trending down. Quentin Tarantino was their Scooby-Doo, which meant there had to be Jabberjaws and Speed Buggys and Funky Phantoms. When people talk about Pulp Fictionrip-offs, they're talking about films like Denver and Albino Alligator, both of which came out through Miramax. They're also talking about movies like The Boondock Saints, which Miramax nearly produced (here's my obligatory mention of the documentary Overnight, about Harvey Weinstein trying to find a new Tarantino and winding up with some random jackass).

So if Denver is a rip-off, it's that by design, repeating Tarantino's plotting and dialogue tics like the Weinsteins were handing down quotas. There are some tough guys with quirks and they're going to botch crimes and make pop culture references.

When the film begins, its title is revealed as "Things to do in Denver" and then, after a beat, it continues "when you're dead," like the filmmakers are pulling one over on the audience, like anybody could buy a ticket without knowing the full title, think they were going to a theater to see a sweet travelogue called Things to Do in Denver and then get scandalized when the full name was revealed. This actually predates Tarantino calling a movie "Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood," where I guess the elipses is supposed to make you jump up in the air and scream "holy fuck, what the shit, are you telling me this is a fairytale in Hollywood and not in a fantasy setting?"

As the opening credits roll, Tom Waits' "Jockey Full of Bourbon" plays and Andy Garcia drives a cool car around a version of Denver that's shot in such a way that it looks exactly like Los Angeles. This is nine years after Down by Law dropped the same song over its opening credits, and that movie actually starred Waits. No offense to Garcia, but we're starting at a deficit.

Jack Warden, playing an unexplained narrator/plot describer, complains about AIDS and the feminist movement ("The only good movement's a bowel movement, you ask me,") in a diner, which is the point Tarantino would have sued if Harvey Weinstein wasn't producing this. Garcia enters, presses palms with Warden and they both say "boat drinks." It is, I assume, a reference to the Jimmy Buffet song "Boat Drinks," though the source goes uncited because Buffet was severely less cool than Tarantino favorites like Madonna and The Delfonics. Though the men are in landlocked Denver, far from the ocean, they routinely discuss retiring and buying yachts, living slow while sipping piña coladas in Key West. "Boat drinks" is used as a greeting throughout the film, though it's used less to mean "hey" and more "someday I won't have to put up with all of this."

Garcia's character, Jimmy the Saint, is a former criminal with remaining ties to whatever criminal underground exists in Denver. Since retiring from his life as a hired gun, he's started running Afterlife Advice, a place where the dying can record video tapes for their loved ones to watch after they've passed. Scott Rosenberg liked the Warren Zevon song title "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead" and had to reverse engineer it into a movie plot somehow, so there you are-- Afterlife Advice.

Jimmy is cool in the way Tarantino characters and their bootleg copies are. While talking with his gay coworker (Willie Garson), he says "you people" are supposed to be good at writing ad copy, which I don't think is a stereotype. You can't just make up a thing that gay men are famously skilled at. Of course, when they have this conversation, it's a fake Mamet-by-way-of-Tarantino thing where they repeat the phrase "you people" seven or eight times in two minutes. People like Jimmy even though he's kind of an asshole because he sticks up for his friends and treats people right, but also he's a tough guy and you should know that he isn't gay. You know, he's cool. He could have been one of Ving Rhames' Pulp Fiction goons.

The plot doesn't make much sense, but its stakes are clear and promise an exciting 90 minutes. Christopher Walken plays a quadripolegic mob boss (also homophobic, of course) whose son Bernard has become a pedophile since breaking up with his high school sweetheart. Walken (his character is named "The Man With The Plan," but I'm not going to write that twice) believes that if Jimmy can run the ex's new boyfriend out of town, she'll return to Bernard and he'll once more prefer the romantic company of consenting adults.

It's weird. What's weirder is that when he calls in a favor and asks Jimmy to help him with this, Jimmy puts together a five-man crew to accomplish what seems like pretty simple intimidation. Maybe two of those guys have necessary jobs, so of course Jimmy's plan blows up. Both the ex and her boyfriend are killed, Walken orders hits on the crew and Bernard is, I guess, trapped with his present sexuality forever. Jimmy's team scatters and his four friends try to escape all the people trying to murder them.

Walken likes Jimmy a lot, though. The other four guys are on a hit list, but Jimmy only has to leave town within 48 hours of Walken's decree. I like that premise a lot, even if we get to it in a stupidly convoluted way. The guy we spend most of the story following always has a wide open out and doesn't have to be in danger, but he chooses to put himself there continually for his friends (and a potential love connection that isn't fleshed out in any meaningful way). I haven't seen that dynamic very much. Usually in crime narratives, there's a gun, actual or otherwise, against the protagonist's head. This protagonist can shrug and walk away whenever he wants.

He doesn't, of course. His crew means too much to him. They, like Christopher Walken's character, have some of the dumbest cool guy nicknames you'll ever hear. I cannot believe a grown man wrote this all out. Jimmy the Saint's crew are "Pieces" Polymeros (Christopher Lloyd), "Big Bear Franchise" (William Forsythe), "Easy Wind" (Bill Nunn) and "Critical Bill" (Treat Williams).

Those are some great actors. Christopher Lloyd, in particular, makes everything better and is the right guy to sell any movie's ridiculousness. His casting is the one the mini-genre innovation Denver introduced that the other Tarantino rip-offs should have copied. Walken got cast in a ton of these films as the 90s went on, but it should have been Lloyd. And if you're smart enough to hire Lloyd in the first place, you should know not saddle him with a tryhard 30s gangster name like Pieces. There's also a guy called Baby Sinister. Steve Buscemi, taking the dorky name cake, plays a hitman who doesn't talk and goes by Mr. Shush.

When you have characters like Easy Wind and Critical Bill, you know they're going to be trading fake-cool dialogue. A man named Big Bear Franchise was not put in theaters in 1996 to talk like a human being. Here's Jack Warden's narrator explaining a nickname origin: "They called him 'Critical Bill' because he never went up against a guy Bill didn't put in critical condition at the very least. But in the days, there never was a better wingman when things got dange. Boy's got equal parts piss, pesticide and pure petroleum jelly runnin' through those veins." There's worse dialogue in this movie, but shortening "danger" to "dange" is heinous, a "how many people had to sign off on this?" decision that you can only hope began as a typo.

The film has its own vernacular, which IMDb claims is a combination of Vietnamese, biker slang and completely made-up terms. Denver is far from dense, but there were a few times its dialogue was so stylized I couldn't tell if I was supposed to take it literally. Critical Bill and Easy Wind, for example, have a fight at the diner because Easy accuses Bill of being "a major-league fecal freak," "a brown boy" and "a fuckin' dookie taster." It was so out-of-the-blue that I assumed I was listening to one character call another an asshole. But no! That isn't fake slang! Easy insists that when he and Bill were in prison, Bill ate some poop.

The most often repeated bit of slang actually ties into the plot. When Walken gives Jimmy the chance to leave Denver, he declares the other members of his crew "buckwheats." It's a bizarre piece of "cool" lingo, so of course Walken says it three times (one is a "buck-fuckin'-wheats") and Jimmy repeats it three more in the next scene. Jack Warden, continuing his semi-narrator role, soon explains that "buckwheats" means you're set to get killed in the most agonizing way possible. A standard buckwheats is getting shot up the ass, which is closer to a Tarantino thing than Tarantino would probably like to admit. It's dumb, but it's no dumber than "The Bonnie Situation."

The repetition is, as I mentioned earlier, a David Mamet thing. It's also a James Ellroy thing. They do it well, or at least Mamet used to, a long time ago. Here, you don't get any information. All of the dialogue is like this:

- "Alex asked me to marry him."

- "He did?"

- "He did."

- "And what did you say?"

- "I said I'd think about it."

- "Are you in love?"

[An intercom announcement ends the scene].

or:

- "You gave me your word on Franchise."

- "Oh, yeah. Gave you my word. Gee whiz, well, Jimmy, don't you see? I'm a criminal. My word don't mean dick."

- "You gave me your word! Your word! Your word, you gave me the other day. You gave me your word."

It's like a delinquent Green Eggs and Ham.

Jimmy's love interest (Gabrielle Anwar) has a weird name (Dagney) in place of a personality.  As a rule, she never kisses on the first date. When Jimmy finds out, he takes her home and leaves Dagney at her apartment door. But then he comes back a few minutes later-- he checked the time and it's 12:04 am, so it's technically a second date (dates are units of measurement on a 24 hour cycle in this world) and they kiss and have sex.

It's something you'd see in a romantic comedy, which is that coincidence and cuteness I talked about last time. The twist in Notting Hill would work in a Tarantino movie. The dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral would, too. His love of and reliance on coincidence is right out of the romcom genre. Bruce Willis hitting Ving Rhames with his car in Pulp Fiction is a meet cute. Christoph Waltz recurs in Mélanie Laurent's Inglourious Basterds story like the characters in Serendipity do in each other's. It's all romantic comedy tropes, Denver's just the movie that applied them to an actual romance plotline.

For how scattered the plot is, it's always clear what's happening: Four guys have to get out of Denver alive and our main character feels he has to help them. There's a 48 hour countdown. The best fake Tarantino movies give their protagonists some kind of clear goal to keep things from getting confusing. These guys have to go into hiding. The Smokin' Aces characters all have to kill one guy. There are some valuable shotguns in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that would make everybody's lives easier. You can meander as far as you want, add as many members of your ensemble as your budget will allow, and clear stakes will always keep everything from getting confusing. Denver is messy, but it's by no means overwhelming.

The movie helps streamline everything further by focusing on one member of the crew at a time. Easy Wind goes on the lam and gets killed. Pieces has a chance to go into hiding in Greece but decides he'd rather die now than of old age. Bill goes missing. Franchise tries to escape but is found dead in a motel room.

Jimmy eventually finds Bill holed up in a shitty house with guns and ammo. He's been awake for four days and has been relieving himself in empty milk jugs. The smell is so bad that Jimmy has to cover his nose with a handkerchief. Bill's dissociating and ready to go down swinging. He does get lucid long enough to admit to eating a little bit of poop once for $500, but the movie's so overwritten that he calls it "500 centuries" and then "5 yards" and then "a small nickel" over the course of the conversation. He, too, gets killed, but the audience is universally relieved to have closure on the question of whether a character tasted poop.

With all of his friends dead, Jimmy proposes to Dagney. She rejects him. He has sex with his sex worker friend Lucinda (Fairuza Balk) so she can have a baby. He records his own Afterlife Advice tape for his unborn child and gets killed. I couldn't tell you why he doesn't leave Denver. There's no real reason given, other than that he assumes he'll get chased down by Walken at some point. It's half-assed in a movie that gets increasingly over the top and more fun toward its conclusion. In a fantasy sequence, the crew are all in Florida, enjoying boat drinks. The Warren Zevon title song plays over the end credits after an excruciating Blues Traveler cover of a Bob Seger song. 

• The Year is 1995: Denver isn't too tied to its time and place. The Blues Traveler song in the credits is as 1995 as the film gets (the band had released their big hit "Run-Around" a year earlier).

• Tarantino defectors: Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken

• Weirdest member of the ensemble: Don Cheadle and Jenny McCarthy have bit parts. Cheadle isn't a weird choice, it's just surprising to see him here, right before he'd break out with Devil in a Blue Dress. McCarthy, though, is a weird choice. She's sort of doing here what Tara Reid would do in The Big Lebowski, only Reid had more to do (and was very funny).

• Weirdest pop culture reference: "Boat Drinks" is a 1979 song by Jimmy Buffet and it forms the backbone of a bunch of people's hopes and dreams

• Most Tarantino moment: Critical Bill ambushes Mr. Shush and yells "I am Godzilla! You are Japan!" And then the two men kill each other.

• Needledrop setpiece: Nothing especially interesting happens while "Jockey Full of Bourbon" plays, but Andy Garcia sure does look cool driving around Denver!

• Innovations in the subgenre: Besides some inspired casting decisions, there really aren't any

• Most ridiculous line of dialogue: "One day you're saving the rainforest, the next you're chugging cock. Am I wrong?"

• Does it work? It's fun enough. The edgy homophobia and racism get pretty grating. The whole movie will pass through you, though. There isn't enough here for you to remember anything even a year after you watch it.

• Where did the writer go? Scott Rosenberg got big and handled a bunch of blockbuster rewrites. After Con Air, he became a regular script doctor for Jerry Bruckheimer, punching up stuff like Armageddon and Pain & Gain. He has credits on both of the recent Jumanji movies. Interestingly, he wrote the Gone in 60 Seconds remake with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. Quentin Tarantino, known to both hold a grudge and talk through his characters, slams the remake in Death Proof. I'm completely convinced this was a shot at Rosenberg for building a career on Impossible Royales.

• Where did the director go? Gary Fielder directed movies like Kiss the Girls and Runaway Jury, other stalwarts of the USA Network afternoon. He's also done a bunch of TV.

• Left behind: Everybody here continued to work, though Bill Nunn's film career slowed down before his 2016 death and William Forsythe mostly shows up in trash like Roe v. Wade and God's Not Dead 4 now.