Tick, Tick . . . Kablooey!

The dispute was settled in August of that year, but no details were announced, so it’s impossible to know who to blame for this botch. Set in 1962, the film stars McGrath as a schoolteacher named Allen Quimp, who, rather like Graham Greene’s man in Havana (though with neither wit nor good writing), becomes an accidental operative. Quimp testifies before a pair of senators trying to get at the truth behind the Bay of Pigs invasion, and it turns out that Cuba was lost for a wife’s want of a fur stole. It sounds like a Henny Youngman joke and plays like one, too — on and on, a swamp of silliness and subpar shtick through which wade and wallow a Soviet defector (Ryan Phillippe), a lunatic agent (John Turturro), a CIA chief (Woody Allen, uncredited — and who can blame him?), Batista (Alan Cumming), Castro (Anthony LaPaglia) and the Quimps (as the wife, Sigourney Weaver doesn’t just wallow; she sinks).

Nearly everyone is terrible except for Cumming, who just does what comes naturally and steals his every scene. In the film’s best moment, Batista turns lounge lizard and sings a woozy “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” a glimpse of satiric madness and good timing that, unlike the rest of the film, is over too soon. Could there be a better movie in here somewhere? In the age of the director as auteur, that’s not something you’re meant to ask. “Forget their legal rights for a moment,” Nora Ephron was quoted as saying around the time of McGrath and Askin’s suit. “Let’s just ask the question, ‘Will they get a better movie by removing the people who created it and whose vision inspired everyone to come aboard, and replac[ing] them with people who are not writers or directors?’ That’s like replacing a pilot with a passenger.” The thing is, for everyone who knows the Zucker brothers, losing the pilot isn’t always a bad idea — especially when you’re looking for laughs.

15 MINUTES | Written and directed by JOHN HERZFELD | Produced by DAVID BLOCKER and HERZFELD | Released by New Line Cinema | Citywide

COMPANY MAN | Written and directed by DOUG McGRATH and PETER ASKIN | Produced by JOHN PENOTTI, RICK LEED and JAMES SCOTCHDOPOLE Released by Paramount Classics | At selected theaters