Louie Kritski (Joe Pesci) is a money-grubbing heartless NYC slumlord who learned it from his father Big Lou (Vincent Gardenia). Housing authorities lawyer Naomi Bensinger prosecutes him. He is sentenced to bring his building up to code and forced to stay in an apartment in his building for 120 days. Louie has to stay in the building and Big Lou commands him not to fix one single thing.The movie is pretty bad and it has to do with Joe Pesci. He's a good comic relief sidekick as this annoying character. Usually the lead characters can show solidarity with the audience and ridicule Pesci. The whole movie is ridiculous and unreal. The slums have no real problems because all of the tenants are saints. Louie cluelessly leaves his expensive car parked in the ghetto. For such a crass person, he is also completely naive. Pesci is aggressively annoying. Of course, he learns the expected heart warming lesson but what else is there?

Joe Pesci plays a slumlord who is forced by court order to live in one of his own tenements. You'll never guess what happens.... He bonds with its nutty, stereotypical minority inhabitants. Wow, who'd thought that would happen! The biggest question this film raises is: Why on earth could have possibility possessed Oscar-winner Joe Pesci to follow-up "Goodfellas" with this awful film. Simply by looking at the dismal final project it is safe to that script wasn't any good. Did they expect director Rod Daniel to save it? If they did, they were terribly mistaken. The only compliment one can pay this film is to say that Ruben Blades didn't disgrace himself, which is more than could be said of Pesci, who gives a shrill, one-note performance. Pesci can provide effective comic relief in serious films, but, "My Cousin Vinny" notwithstanding, he isn't very funny in comedies. (Would you really want to spend a whole film with Leo Getz?)

I find it interesting that this lame and obscure comedy is praised in the user comments by foreigners and disparaged by most of the Americans. It must be related to the reasons the French think the Disorderly Orderly is the greatest film comedy ever to illuminate the silver screen. Objectively speaking, most coherent humans over the age of eight should agree that this movie is pretty lousy. Like many others, I saw it because I'm a fan of Pesci and Gardenia. But it's impossible to get past the underlying lameness of the script. All the hackneyed gags fall flat, and the spiritual growth of the irritating leading man is wholly unbelievable. It's of more interest as a case study in how a comedy can go wrong than as entertainment.

Profanity, stupidity, self-indulgence, and bad acting all join forces for a true tour de force in terrible movie-making. Pesci's attempt to prove My Cousin Vinny was no fluke, shows the opposite instead. He is generally too lightweight and foulmouthed to handle the lead. A true must-miss!