Big Business (1988)

Big Business is the kind of old-school, high-wire farce that feels like it was engineered to make an audience laugh, then laugh harder once the gears really start turning. Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin don’t just play twins—they play four distinct women with such sharp comic conviction that the movie becomes a joyful showcase of timing, physical humor, and perfectly pitched attitude. Jim Abrahams keeps the pace brisk and buoyant, letting the Plaza Hotel setting and corporate-vs-small-town culture clash build into a deliciously escalating swirl of near-misses and mistaken identities. If you’re allergic to contrived premises, you’ll have to meet it halfway, but if you like big performances and clever chaos that never stops moving, this is a crowd-pleasing comedy that earns its silliness.

Big Business is trying to be a classic, high-energy farce: identical twins, swapped at birth, finally colliding in a New York corporate showdown with chaos as the main course. When it works, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin are game and charismatic enough to sell the premise, and the movie has a breezy, old-school screwball spirit. The problem is it often feels like a machine built to generate mix-ups—lots of busy running around, loud misunderstandings, and plot gears turning—without the kind of sharp escalation or payoff that makes farce truly satisfying. If you love broad, cartoonish mistaken-identity comedy and don’t mind a clunky pace, you’ll have fun; if you need tight writing, earned laughs, and a cleaner build to the finale, this one may test your patience.