Pure Luck(1991)

After Eugene (Martin Short) is robbed of nearly $2,000 at the El Sombrero bar by a con woman and then beaten up by three thugs associated with her, Raymond (Danny Glover) decides to help him get his money back by first roughing up the bartender into telling him that the woman lives with Fernando (Rodrigo Puebla), a local crime boss, and that Fernando runs a private gambling club in the old town. Raymond and Eugene drive over to the club, and after forcing their way through the front entrance, they barge into one of the rooms to find Fernando playing poker with some thugs (two of whom are the ones that beat up Eugene) and the con woman sitting on a chair nearby. At gunpoint, Raymond orders Fernando to hand over $2,000, and Fernando ends up doing so despite attempts by a couple of the thugs to get the better of Raymond. As Raymond and Eugene drive away, Eugene asks Raymond what Valerie’s (Sheila Kelley) kidnapper, Grimes (Scott Wilson), looks like, so Raymond pulls a picture of him out of his pocket and shows him. Eugene points out that Grimes was one of the thugs gambling with Fernando, so they return to Fernando’s club, where Raymond subdues the thugs a second time and then forces Grimes to come with him and Eugene.

In the morning, Raymond and Eugene pull over on the side of a highway that lies a short distance away from a beach so Raymond can interrogate Grimes. After pulling out Grimes at gunpoint, Raymond shows him a picture of Valerie and demands to know if this is the girl he brought from Puerto Vallarta. Grimes initially refuses to answer him, but when Raymond threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t talk, he caves in and tells Raymond that he knew that Valerie was trouble right from the start, and he had no intention of hurting her because he didn’t need to; she easily hurts herself. Grimes goes on to explain that he took her hostage because he thought that he could get some money from her family, and he informs Raymond and Eugene that she is presently suffering from amnesia and doesn’t know who she is. After she accumulated a bunch of medical bills that cleaned him out financially, he decided to turn her over to Fernando because he could no longer afford to keep her hostage. Raymond puts Grimes back in the car and tells Eugene that they are going back to the gambling club to have another chat with Fernando, but Grimes pleads with them to not take him back there because Fernando and his men will kill him if they find out that he talked. However, the three men quickly find themselves unable to go anywhere thanks to Eugene getting the car’s right rear wheel stuck in a pile of sand when he parked it. Exasperated by how much bad luck that Eugene courts, Raymond flips out at him over this latest incident, and the duo soon get into an argument. However, in the middle of it, Raymond suddenly notices a van approaching from the opposite direction that has a pair of hands holding a machine gun sticking out of one of the windows. As the shooter – undoubtedly working for Fernando – opens fire, Raymond brings Eugene down to the ground with him and keeps them both from getting shot, but Grimes gets fatally wounded. After the van speeds off, Grimes tells the duo that he blames Valerie for this, and after warning them that it will be their turn next, he dies. Raymond and Eugene then discover that their car has been rendered unusable thanks to one of the bullets puncturing a hole in the gas tank and another taking out the left rear tire, so they walk off towards the beach and leave Grimes’ body on the road.

A short time after arriving at the beach, Raymond and Eugene are arrested by the police (presumably because they found Grimes’ body and thought that Raymond and Eugene had killed him), and they get taken to the nearest police station. Before he gets placed in a cell with Eugene, Raymond tells the cops (off-screen) that Fernando has Valerie and that he wants them to get in touch with his police contact, Inspector Segura (Jorge Russek). That night (and after two beatings that Raymond sustains from the guards as a result of Eugene’s bad luck), Segura finally comes to the station, and after clearing up any misunderstandings regarding Raymond and Eugene, he gets the two men freed from their cell. After he brings them to his office, he tells them that his officers earlier picked up Fernando and got him to talk, but all he had to give was bad news: After Raymond and Eugene left with Grimes, he panicked and put Valerie on a private plane to Mexico City. Unfortunately, Segura then informs them that he found out that the plane never made it there, and he believes that it must have crashed somewhere in the jungle. The next morning, Eugene asks Raymond if he called Mr. Highsmith (Sam Wanamaker) and gave him the bad news about his daughter, and he replies that he did, but Highsmith is convinced that Valerie survived the plane crash and is still alive somewhere. Eugene comes to believe that that might be true, given the fact that her body hasn’t been found yet and she has great natural durability because of her accident-prone nature, and Raymond tells him that Highsmith has come up with a new idea for them that ties in with that belief: He wants them both to go up in a plane and fly over the part of the jungle where Valerie’s plane crashed, thinking that they might get lucky and crash in the same place and find her.

Later on, the guys go to the airport and hire a pilot to fly them around the jungle in his small airplane, but while they are airborne, Eugene gets stung by a bee that got stuck on his clothes before he went inside. Since he is severely allergic to bee stings, his face and body swell up quickly and he starts to choke, so Raymond orders the pilot to land the plane immediately. After they land on an airstrip in the jungle, Raymond and Eugene get taken to a field hospital by two medics, and though Eugene is successfully treated, they wind up having to stay there overnight. When Raymond approaches Eugene the next morning to see how he is doing, Eugene directs his attention to an awake but unresponsive patient sitting across the room from him, and he tells him that he learned from the nurses that this patient’s whole village burned to the ground and he is suffering from nightmares about it. He then explains to Raymond that this man keeps talking in his sleep about a girl who wandered into his village one day; he fed her and gave her a place to sleep, but when she offered to cook him breakfast the next morning, the entire village ended up getting incinerated. He then has Raymond show the patient his picture of Valerie to see how he reacts to her, and the man screams upon seeing her, but when Raymond asks the man if he knows this woman, Eugene informs him that he can’t speak because he is still in a state of shock. Raymond tells him that they have picked up Valerie’s trail again, and Eugene replies that they need to find this village.

Raymond and Eugene get a hold of a jeep and drive through the jungle to the ruined village, but they find it completely abandoned. Soon after, Eugene spots a venomous snake near Raymond’s feet that is making ready to strike him, but when he tries to shoot it with Raymond’s gun, he accidentally wounds Raymond in his right leg. After the snake slithers away and Eugene dresses the wound with his left shirtsleeve, Eugene tells Raymond that he needs to get to a doctor so the wound doesn’t become infected and that there should be one at a Roman Catholic mission that lies 12 miles from their present location. Sometime later, after they narrowly avoid death when Eugene accidentally causes their jeep to dangle over the edge of a cliff (which winds up falling and getting destroyed shortly after they get out of it), Raymond tells Eugene that they need to keep moving, and he decides to drop the façade of pretending that Eugene is in charge of the investigation by telling him straight up that HE is really in charge of it and has been since the beginning. He then asks Eugene if he ever wondered why Highsmith and Dr. Monosoff (Harry Shearer) – Highsmith’s company’s psychological consultant – chose him, an accountant who doesn’t speak Spanish, for this assignment. When Eugene can’t come up with a decent answer, Raymond informs him that they chose him because he is a walking disaster area, just like Valerie, and they thought that, because of that, he might lead him (Raymond) right to her. When Eugene refuses to believe any of this, Raymond tells him that Highsmith and Monosoff were just leading him on when they told him that he had a highly developed sense of intuition and a bold, creative flair for problem solving. He then caps it off by telling Eugene that, though he doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, he is taking charge because he doesn’t want to be found in this jungle dead from exhaustion or eaten by some animal (which he thinks is what will happen if Eugene is allowed to continue on believing that he is the one calling the shots). Deeply upset, Eugene tries to attack Raymond, but he just winds up hurting himself and then knocks himself out.

Raymond carries the unconscious Eugene through the jungle until he hears the sound of a truck’s motor nearby, so he follows the noise down to a road and spots a truck coming towards him. He gets it to stop, and after asking the driver to take him and Eugene to the mission, the driver obliges them. Once the duo get there, Eugene is put on a gurney and wheeled away to be treated while Raymond explains to one of the nuns that Eugene might be suffering with a serious head injury brought on from all of the hits that he took to the head during the course of the film. The nun then asks him if Eugene is a close friend of his, and Raymond admits – to his own pleasant surprise – that he is. Later, when Eugene regains consciousness, he sees that Valerie is lying in a bed next to his, but because he has developed amnesia like she has, he doesn’t recognize her. The two of them develop a near-instant attraction to each other and decide to get out of their beds and take a walk outside together hand-in-hand, and they end up stopping at the end of a dock connected to a lake that lies behind the mission. When Raymond sees the two of them out there and calls out to Eugene, they both turn and look at him, and he sees that Valerie is with Eugene. The section of dock they are standing on then collapses into the water, but neither of them lose their balance, and as they start to float away, Raymond calls out to Eugene that the woman he is with is Valerie Highsmith, which helps them both regain their memories.

However, as Eugene gently caresses Valerie’s face, neither of them notice that they are both floating towards the top of a huge waterfall….