"Innerspace" (1987)

“Innerspace” is a silly comedy adventure film produced by Spielberg and directed by Joe Dante. With Martin Short at the peak of his career, it has a humor featuring pratfall, silly, performance-based jokes instead of relying on shock humor that has been relied on more and more as audiences become more calloused. Beyond the comedy, though, it also featured an engaging plot and characters that grow over the course of the story.

Short plays Jack, a hypochondriac check-out clerk who is unknowingly injected with an experimental miniaturized submarine piloted by test-pilot, man’s-man, Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quade). Tuck mission was to navigate a lad rabbit, but industrial espionage led to the unplanned mishap.

Over the course of the film, Jack and Tuck try to stay one step ahead of the people trying to kill them for the technology, all while trying to recover a MacGuffin that will enable them to re-enlarge Tuck before he runs out of air. In order to do that, they enlist the help of Meg Ryan’s Lydia, Tuck recently ex-girlfriend.

The comedy is hilarious. The adventure is entertaining. But what really takes this film to another level, what puts it in this top 100, is the character development. It is a joy to see Jack and Tuck grow and become stronger as people.

Jack starts out as a fearful hypochondriac; paranoid and helpless in life. He truly is a rabbit of a character. But over the course of this experience, he is forced to take initiative and fight for himself and others. Even though he is occasionally “enhanced” with help from Tuck, it is his self-confidence that makes all the difference. By the end of the film, he is a totally different person.

Tuck too has changes he needs to make to become the man he needs to be. At the start of the film, Lydia is leaving him not because she does not love him, but because she is realizing he will never be the man he needs to be for a life-commitment. He is too self-obsessed, too self-destructive, and unaware of those around him. But, seeing Lydia through another’s eyes (Jack’s) and hearing her talk candidly about him and their relationship without knowing he is there gives him new perspective. Seeing for himself what had changed in their relationship (a baby on the way) ultimately wakes him up to the changes he needs to make going forward.