The 1997 black comedy The Wrong Guy, served up by a veritable smorgasbord of Canadian comedic masterminds (from director David Steinberg to star Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall fame to even a cameo from the Barenaked Ladies as singing doo-wop policemen), is just about the definition of underground these days. Due to a series of unfortunate events mid-production, the film never even got a theatrical release in America, and was instead relegated to wasting away in the straight-to-DVD ether for all eternity—which is an unbelievable shame. Its failure was practically the death knell for many of the film’s creators, especially Foley himself, which is particularly devastating considering it was intended to do the exact opposite. There is most certainly a world in which The Wrong Guy got its proper due—at the very least becoming a cult hit—and Foley and co. were propelled into the world of so-dumb-it’s-smart comedy, set to have illustrious careers. There’s even a world in which the film broke into the mainstream zeitgeist as a beloved Jim Carrey caper (who apparently saw the script and wanted to star, an offer the film’s creators ended up turning down, as “the whole reason behind us writing it was to do it for ourselves”). Sadly, we seem to live in the worst possible timeline, and The Wrong Guy remains almost entirely unknown.
This is not to say we’re talking about a perfect movie; it lags a tad in its third act, and some of its gags fall somewhat flat or fail to hold up as well 20 odd years down the line. For instance, a recurring bit wherein Foley’s character gets mistaken for a woman gets a bit old, and a very ’90s joke about a pink-loving, Bronski-Beat-listening brother definitely being straight doesn’t land that great anymore. But there are myriad films that have much worse issues and yet have rocketed into the echelon of silly evergreen comfort movies anyways—and those don’t have half the charm of this Canadian romp. The Wrong Guy might not be Citizen Kane, but it’s far too good to languish in insignificance, unavailable on every streaming platform and only watchable via YouTube rip (plus side: that means it’s free!).
How funny you’ll find The Wrong Guy is probably directly proportional to how much mileage you think you’d get out of its aggressively silly premise: It’s The Fugitive, if the only person who thought Harrison Ford was wanted for murder was Harrison Ford himself. In other words, if he was dramatically on the lam for quite literally no reason … and also if he was incredibly bad at it.
After a surprisingly great animated credit sequence, we open on Dave Foley’s incomprehensibly dim business executive Nelson Hibbert very publicly threatening his boss upon being passed over for a promotion (he even proposed to his boss’ daughter for this—but, to his dismay, his coworker had married the boss’ other, favorite daughter). Upon stomping over to the big man’s office to give him another piece of his mind, Hibbert finds little more than a vacant stare and (gasp!) a knife in his boss’ neck waiting for him. What follows is about a five-minute extended bit that serves as an antithesis to How to Get Away With Murder; it’s essentially a tutorial on How (Not) to Get Away With a Murder (You Did Not Commit). Foley’s uniquely rubbery and entirely committed physicality is at full effect here: he shrieks at inhuman decibels, overtly panicking, as he runs around and pulls the knife out of his boss’ neck (??), shrieks some more upon realizing what he did, tries to put it back in the neck (???), can’t bring himself to do it, shrieks even more, and eventually runs out of the room into the crowded hallway, still shrieking, now covered in comically fake Kool Aid colored blood and, even worse, brandishing the murder weapon (????). So yeah, I do understand why he assumed the world thought him to be the murderer. The problem, though, is that they didn’t—and yet Hibbert begins a trek to Mexico anyways, believing it to be inevitable. “I don’t care which direction [I’m going],” he dramatically tells a bus driver, “I just need to get to Mexico,” seemingly unaware that that is, in fact, a direction. Unbeknownst to him (and at first, the real killer), there were active surveillance cameras rolling the entire time, and the killer (who goes unnamed throughout the film and is played with stoic suaveness by The Umbrella Academy’s Colm Feore) was witnessed red-handed—albeit not as literally red-handed as the blood-drenched Hibbert. Furious at his faulty information, the overly competent killer (as the cops continuously remark in awe, the man pulled himself into an air duct to escape, which has never been seen before nor since) begins to make his way to the border, where a Swiss passport will be waiting for him. Strange, though, that this little blonde man keeps popping up everywhere he goes. The killer deduces that his shadow must be a super spy who caught onto him, and curses that he’s met his match. Spoiler: it’s just Hibbert, and he has no idea who Feore even is, nor is he even aware of his existence.
The only thing The Wrong Guy loves more than ludicrous misunderstandings and inconceivable degrees of incompetence is a good trope. Nearly every moment of the film is spent riffing on, exacerbating to the point of ridiculousness, and/or wholly reversing all kinds of movie clichés, from thriller staples (you could even call the film an anti-thriller, given how frequently it subverts thriller norms) to Hallmark classics. When a lower-than-average intelligence man is forced on the run by the law, it’s only expected that he has few ideas for survival beyond what he’s seen badasses do on the big screen. As he melodramatically monologues to his fiancé via pay phone, “I must live in hiding, never able to rest, never a moment’s peace, startling at every noise. ‘What’s that?’ I’ll say. ‘Oh, only an alley cat with an empty tin. How like that mangy Tom am I…”—except each of those classic “on the lam” tropes are negated by idiocy every time. Hibbert attempts to throw the murder weapon off a bridge, trying to look inconspicuous by not looking as he does it, only for the knife to clatter upon the roof of a police boat because of his lack of aim. He gives out fake names like candy, except he can’t think of any; he tries to come up with line-of-sight pseudonyms a la Keyser Söze, but keeps choosing the worst possible options (for instance, at one point he’s in the hospital after accidentally ingesting ten cans of tainted ham [long story], and tells the doctor, after a pregnant pause, that he is named “Enema Bag Jones”—and when that fails to convince her, he apologizes and says his real name is “Dr. Helen Harris,” a title he took from her own name card). He tries to get some money from an ATM (his pin is 1111, of course), and only belatedly realizes doing so would show that he was there; upon that realization, he panics and promptly throws away all his credit cards, making him entirely broke. He attempts to jump through the open door of a moving train to make an escape, but accidentally somersaults straight through it, rolling out the opposite door and landing on the other side of the track. It’s so stupid. It’s wonderful.
There’s also the killer himself, who wears a different occupational disguise practically every time he’s onscreen (janitor, phone line technician, doctor, priest—after that I stopped keeping track) and whose competence is vastly overstated by the cops chasing him to such an extent that they frequently try to give up because he’s just too damn cool. And then there’s the police force, helmed by Detective Arlen (David Anthony Higgins, one of the film’s creators), a man far more willing to weaponize his incompetence than his investigative prowess. Arlen very evidently sees the case as little more than a great excuse to use police money to do whatever the hell he wants: He drags the force with him to a strip club based on his “intuition” telling him that they’d get into the killer’s head by seeing the girls dance (note that there was no evidence of the killer being in a strip club whatsoever). He requisitions a helicopter to go see his sister in Cincinnati and flies to New York (despite the case never even touching the state) to see the hottest new Broadway show, a Moby Dick musical called Moby. At one point, he even seizes an elderly man’s mobility scooter so he wouldn’t have to walk an extra 10 feet. The only good cops in this movie are the ones playing quarters in the alleyway and singing around a trash can (mostly because they are played, again, by the Barenaked Ladies).
Despite how ridiculous much of the film is, it’s almost always playing dumb, rather than actually being it. It’s fueled by a Hitchcockian sensibility, from the score to the many subtle yet pointed allusions; it’s Hitchcock if Hitchcock were unrepentantly silly. Hibbert’s attempt to sign into a highway motel via fake name is a sillier Psycho, the way he comes into unfortunate custody of the murder weapon is a sillier North by Northwest, the final showdown’s location (an Americana obsessed mini-golf-course’s giant replica of the Statue of Liberty) is an immensely sillier Saboteur.
Thrillers aren’t the only genre The Wrong Guy spoofs, either; for an excellently baffling half hour that feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie, Hibbert takes up residence with a to-be love interest (a breathy Jennifer Tilly) and her down-on-his-luck father (Joe Flaherty) in their small town—they can’t even afford ice, Tilly says before breaking into sobs—and tries to help the family keep their generations-long business. In a perfectly ludicrous send-up of the Hallmark-esque small town romance (a la Christmas in the Smokies) of “those damn evil bankers taking over the small family farm,” The Wrong Guy instead shakes its fist at those damn evil farmers taking over the small family bank. The mustachioed, sinister Farmer Brown (Alan Scarfe) gets some of the best one-liners in the film: As he drawls into the phone at one point, “I don’t care if that strip mall’s been in your family for generations; soon it’ll be a pasture for dairy cattle, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Tilly’s Lynn—who, it’s worth mentioning, is incredibly and inexplicably narcoleptic—enlists Hibbert to work at the family bank in the hopes of saving it from Farmer Brown and his sneering declarations about wanting “to tear this bank down and plant me a fresh crop of corn.” Unfortunately, through yet another series of misunderstandings buoyed by Hibbert’s own repeated insistence that he is wanted for murder (he is not), the town rebels against the bank at Farmer Brown’s behest, aghast that their teller is a cold-blooded killer. Flaherty’s Fred Holden attempts to talk the mob down with a monologue that would feel at home in It’s a Wonderful Life, asking them if they’re really “going to risk [all the bank has done for them] on the basis of one stupid rumor.” The answer, however, is a resounding yes—literally (as one townsperson yells in response, “Yes, we are!”).
The film thrives on its exacerbations and subversions of cliché, not only in its long-term gags but its moment-to-moment jokes. A gas station owner fantasizes about getting rich and tells his coworker “You know what I’d do with a million dollars? I’d buy me a new gas station with solid gold pumps.” Lynn bemoans the loneliness inherent in small town living: “Well, you know how small towns are; everybody’s in such a rush. The hurly burly of farm life … It’s just hard to meet people.” At the film’s end, Hibbert gives a heartfelt monologue to Lynn about looking forward to moving in with her and her father in their small town and living the good life—only for Lynn to say she does not want to live there anymore and wants to go the big city with him, a proposition to which he happily agrees. He says he’s down to jump back into the rat race he just spent the past minute railing against, and she kisses him for it (before promptly passing out due to her narcolepsy and leaving him to awkwardly prop up her limp form as the film fades to black). But then there are also just the random, standalone gags that are all the funnier for their lack of explanation: the DJ on the radio station follows up a song with “Uh, that was … jazz. Some sort of … jazz ensemble … Now here’s some news on the … news machine.” The local newspaper masthead just reads “Banner Graphic.” Lynn and her father only eat raw spam and saltines. And in perhaps my favorite scene, Hibbert hitchhikes with a strange man (Enrico Colantoni) quickly revealed to be a manic conspiracist, who breathily asks him if he knows how many assassins it took to kill JFK. Upon hearing Hibbert’s hesitant response of “one?” he grins manically: “Nope. There were no gunmen at all. Kennedy’s head just did that. I call it the ‘No Bullet Theory.'” He also informs Hibbert that the real killer behind his boss’ murder “is a Cuban assassin; nine out of 10 times this is true” and that “many common household items can be used as deadly weapons, friend. I could kill you right now with two teabags and some wax paper” (which is a bit that comes back later) before unceremoniously kicking him to the curb out of sheer paranoia. Great character, no notes.
In all, a surprising amount of thought went into The Wrong Guy, considering how rarely any of the characters exercise that muscle. It has the absurdism of Kids in the Hall, the vaudevillian slapstick of Charlie Chaplin, and the universal idiocy of The Simpsons’ world (not in the least because Jay Kogen, a writer for The Simpsons’ golden age, was one of the film’s creators) The cast is stacked, from Foley’s pitch-perfect comedic timing to Tilly’s narcoleptic pixie dream girl, and so is the creative team. It’s Foley’s self-described best film, and Kogen calls it one of “the great successes of our careers.” It’s even beloved by the few celebrities that know it exists: Mark Hamill calls it “the best kept secret in showbiz,” Reggie Watts gave an entire interview about how brilliantly hilarious the film is, and Seth Rogen says he “can’t use [his] colostomy bag without thinking of this film,” which is really about the highest compliment one could give. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s most-read newspaper, has declared the film to be the single best Canadian comedy of all time. And yet, despite everything, The Wrong Guy was such an utter commercial failure that Dave Foley “to this day now advise[s] all young comedians starting out: Do not follow your dreams” (or, as Higgins amends, “Sell your dream to Jim Carrey”). As recently as 2023, the film’s creators have gone on record as not even knowing who actually owns it—all the movie’s distributors folded simultaneously, meaning distribution rights ended, so there’s not even an actual owner of the film anymore; it’s just adrift on YouTube. But, again, there is one silver lining: the fact that it is (only) available for free on YouTube means there is absolutely no reason not to watch it. So go watch it now. Do it. If not for me, then for Dave Foley. The Wrong Guy, we’ll make a cult classic out of you yet.