Splash (1984)

IMDb plot summary: A man is reunited with a mermaid who saves him from drowning as a boy and falls in love not knowing who/what she is.
Directed by Ron Howard. Starring Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah, Eugene Levy, and John Candy.

(Vague spoilers about the ending.)

I really do like Tom Hanks in drier comedic roles like this one. He has mastered the art of delivering sarcastic lines in a genuinely funny way. In fact, pretty much everyone who's required to be funny in this movie pulls it off. Where the movie doesn't work is in its ending, where the comedy gets pushed aside to make way for a romance-centric ending. While the romance was obviously a large part of the story, it was rooted in comedy, with Madison not knowing how to behave in the human world and Allen not quite knowing how to behave with her, and when the movie takes a turn for the dramatic, it loses its charm and seems just kind of dumb. Fortunately, that's only in the last 15 minutes, and the rest of this is pretty solid. I was surprised by how much I liked most of it and disappointed by the bland (and nonsensical) ending.

3 stars.

Flickchart: #901 out of 2286, below Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Peter Pan (1960).