Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
Film has Farrah, little else
Cleveland Press August 13, 1979
"Sunburn" is a movie masquerading as a mystery-comedy romance. The mystery is more confusing than mysterious and the comedy is not as funny as it tries to be.
Charles Grodin portrays an insurance investigator sent to Acapulco to check out a $5 million accidental death claim. The insurance company hopes it that it was either suicide or murder which would invalidate the claim.
Grodin takes along a New York model who poses as his wife (in name only) during the investigation. Once in Acapulco, he contacts a retired private eye, Art Carney, to help with the investigation.
Grodin is a master of the double take, but the material here isn't worth his efforts. He is supposed to be cool and efficient, but actually he is inept.
Fawcett-Majors, on the other hand, is supposed to be an amateur and slightly kooky, but it is she who wins out over the enemy.
Carney is his usual dependable self as he shuffles along almost making what he does look like something worth doing.
Movies such as this require bright dialogue and "Sunburn" doesn't have it. What few lines she has just aren't terribly bright the way Fawcett-Majors speaks them.
The film is designed to show off her face, hair, teeth and figure although not necessarily in that order.
In that it succeeds, but there's little there that we haven't already seen on posters.
