When the police discover that a mob hit-man has moved next door to the titular family, they want to finally capture him for a major crime. They set up shop in the Robbersons' home. Hard-nosed, drizzled, long in the tooth, and any other cliché you can use to call an older cop, Jake Stone is assigned to the stakeout. But now it's a question of whether Jake can last long enough to capture the bad guys, as the Robbersons are not your typical nuclear family.This marks the phase in Chases career where he looked like he just couldn't be bothered with the films he was making anymore, and here, it really shows. His character is obsessed with TV cop shows, so it's a dream come true when the real police set up shop in his home.But you'd think he couldn't care less, as Chase just maunders through one unfunny set piece to the next, situations that should induce laughs, induce groans, and the fact that all the characters are just stereotypical cookie cutter characters from any old movie, doesn't help the cause.Palance hates everyone at the beginning, riffing on his City Slickers Curly, but guess what? After a few days with the family, he begins to know the true meaning of family and becomes a lot never to everyone.His partner ends up with the daughter, and Dianne Wiest comes all gung-ho in the final stand off.Davi is your typical criminal, devoid of any common sense, bearing in mind he works for the mob, but accepts the fact that someone is freely roaming the house.It's a shame, because Chase was a very hands on actor when he was at the top of his game, but he's been playing the same character for the last twenty years in his movies, bored husband, who gets an opportunity to do something different, and looks equally as bored.He should take a long Vacation.....

30 minutes into 'Cops and Robbersons' I found myself clawing at the sides of my seat cushion. An hour into it I found myself with my head down tugging at my hair and groaning loudly. This sounds a bit childish so I will elaborate. 'Cops and Robbersons' is a terribly unfunny movie made by talented people who have made excellent films and stars actors who have made me laugh in the past so it is frustrating when I see them entrenched in a laughless screenplay. When a good actor takes a bad screenplay you can always sense their talent trying to get out.The screenwriters have assembled a comic formula out of the nuts and bolts of other movies and tried to fasten them together to make a funny movie. This never works because 'Cops and Robbersons' is a movie pitch, not a movie itself. It's the beginning of an idea that doesn't need fine tuning so much as it needs a complete overhaul.The movie takes The Robbersons, an ordinary Ozzie and Harriet family and puts as its head Norman Robberson (Chevy Chase) a man who is obsessed with cop shows. The dilemma is that a mobster (Robert Davi) has moved in next door and the authorities want to use the Robbersons' home to stake them out. Leading the stakeout is a rough-hewn cop (Jack Palance) who rolls his own cigarettes and always seems to have one planted in his leathery mug. Saddle that with a nagging wife, a daughter who develops an unconvincing romance with the mobster's son and a 5-year old who plays vampire and bites Palance on the neck.These are nuts and bolts not inspiration. They are the stuff of bad sitcom writing – the kind of writing that gets a show cancelled. When I see a movie like this that is directed at a sitcom loving audience I always marvel at how much less funny it sounds without a laugh track.Now onto the cast starting with Chevy Chase. My favorite Chase comedies are the ones that allow him to be a smart-ass mostly because he can do it without sounding like a bore. I've seen it in 'Spies Like Us' and 'Funny Farm' and the 'Fletch' pictures and a little in the first 'Vacation' movie. But here he's an annoying dope who is always in the way and just bumbles around reminding me that his Gerald Ford routine was funnier when he did it in a five minute sketch on 'Saturday Night Live'.Jack Palance surprised me in 'City Slickers' by taking his usual tough ol' buzzard persona and injecting it with humanity, warmth and truth. Here he's the same crusty old guy but the warmth and truth are gone because the movie doesn't have time between painful slapstick.Diane Weist has done her best work for Woody Allen. So, I try to measure Diane Weist's characters thusly: Would the character she's playing be convincing if she were playing it in a Woody Allen movie, in most cases yes. So, she's playing a good (albiet underwritten) character here in the wrong movie. There is one rather serious moment when she talks to Palance about his smoking that I thought was the movie's only ray of sunshine.I don't know what dragged director Michael Ritchie into this film after directing Chase in 'Fletch' and directing the marvelous (and somewhat similar) 'The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom'.By the way, you will note that I have avoided describing any of the specific scenes. That's because I just feel that this talented cast has had enough.

I am a huge Chevy Chase fan. With that said, his movies in the 90's were not very good and this was one of them. Jack Palance is too old to be a cop in the first place and he isn't funny. Chevy Chase is a superb comic and comes off funny in this movie at times, but the script is poor. The only humorous parts to me was actually the kid thinking he was a vampire.Rating: 4/10

Chevy Chase and Jack Palance are both great actors and with Diane Wiest playing as a wanna-be good mother this movie is great.The way that Palance acts around Chase is great. This is on my must see list