Twins (film)

Directed by Ivan Reitman
Produced by Ivan Reitman
Written by William Davies &
William Osborne and
Timothy Harris &

Budget $15,000,000 (est)

Twins is a 1988 comedy film directed by Ivan Reitman about unlikely twins (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito) that were separated at birth. The core of the film is the relationship between DeVito's streetwise character and Arnold's Ingenue persona. The original music score was composed by Georges Delerue and Randy Edelman.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito, and Hulk Hogan have all revealed in interviews that Schwarzenegger and DeVito were given the option of doing this movie or Suburban Commando. Had DeVito and Schwarzenegger made Suburban Commando, Hulk Hogan and Christopher Lloyd would have made this movie. Only Hogan and DeVito state that Vincent would have been hassled by horse racing bookies instead of loan sharks. The film is marketed with the tagline "Only their mother can tell them apart."

Plot

Julius and Vincent Benedict are fraternal twins; the results of a secret experiment carried out at a genetics laboratory to produce the perfect child, using sperm donated by six different fathers. The mother, Mary Ann was told that the children died at birth. Accepting this, she goes on to become a successful artist.

In fact, they both survived. Vincent was placed in an orphanage run by nuns in Los Angeles, California whilst Julius was taken to an unnamed South Pacific island and raised to become highly intelligent, physically very strong and spiritually pure. He learned to speak twelve languages, and excelled in mathematics, history, science and literature. He was not told about his younger brother until his 35th birthday.

In Los Angeles, with no-one but himself to rely on, Vincent escapes from the orphanage as soon as he is old enough and develops into the ultimate lowlife, involved in shady business deals and car theft and in debt to loan sharks. He is also a womanizer and a smart aleck with a very greedy lust for money. He is about to be killed by the loan sharks when he is arrested for unpaid parking fines.

Julius is told about his unknown brother, and comes to Los Angeles to look for him. Highly intelligent, but extremely naive about the real world his brother inhabits, he bails Vincent out of jail and meets Vincent's on-off-on girlfriend Linda Mason. Knowing little about women, Julius doesn't understand the flirtatious advances of her blonde sister Marnie, but eventually falls in love with her.

Using a stolen Cadillac that's carrying a secret prototype fuel injector, which Vincent is delivering to a rival industrialist in Houston, Texas, the two couples go on a cross-country journey to track down the scientist who was in charge of the experiment, and pressure him to reveal the location of their mother, who they find out has founded an art colony. Visiting the colony, they're informed their mother died and leave. In reality, the women who told them of the passing is in fact their mother but she didn't believe the story, fearing they were land speculators..

Angry and disappointed, Vincent storms off and delivers the stolen property in return for five million dollars. But as Vincent is about to return home with the money, the industrialist, Donald "Beetroot" McKinley, has been shot to death. Julius saves him from being killed by Webster, the real contract delivery man, who has tracked them down.

They return the money (the "four million dollars", suggesting they (or at least Vincent) skimmed a million off), marry the sisters, and use the $50,000 reward money to start up a legitimate consulting business ("Like the RAND corporation- only smarter!"), utilizing Julius's knowledge and Vincent's questionable business savvy. As a result of the publicity, their mother tracks them down and they are tearfully reunited. In the end, both brothers end up having pairs of twins with their respective wives.

Cast

Arnold Schwarzenegger - Julius Benedict

Danny DeVito - Vincent Benedict

Kelly Preston - Marnie Mason
Chloe Webb - Linda Mason
Bonnie Bartlett - Mary Ann Benedict
Trey Wilson - Beetroot McKinley
Marshall Bell - Webster

David Caruso - Al Greco
Hugh O'Brian - Granger

Nehemiah Persoff - Mitchell Traven
Maury Chaykin - Burt Klane

Tony Jay - Werner

Tom McCleister - Bob Klane (as Thom McCleister)
David Efron - Morris Klane
Peter Dvorsky - Peter Garfield

Action and Adventure -

Animation - Comedy - Crime - Documentary -
Family - Foreign Language - Historical - Horror - Musical - Political