American comedy is different from Australian comedy. It is broader. American audiences enjoyed Pure Luck, but audiences in other countries did not enjoy it so much with the exception of the Germans. I wanted to do something else with the comedy and so did Danny Glover. I would like to have put a lot more pathos and pain into it. But they wanted a comedy for America. The cartoon series Hey Arnold! had a character, Eugene Horowitz, who is also a jinx and was likely based on Eugene Proctor from the film. The Simpsons introduced a character named Frank Grimes in "Homer's Enemy" who suffers a similar fate at the hands of the cosmically careless Homer Simpson. Owen Gleiberman summed up Pure Luck in his D− review as, "a numbingly repetitive farce in which the cursed Short trips, walks into walls, trips, spills an entire saltshaker onto his breakfast, trips, sets people on fire, trips ..." Roger Ebert gave the film one and a half stars, and zeroed in on the emptiness of much of the film's comedy:Consider, for example, the scene where Proctor and Campanella are in a Jeep that is teetering on the edge of a cliff, its rear wheels hanging in mid-air. We've seen situations like this many times before, but I can't remember one less compelling. It unspools without comic timing, it stops dead in the middle, the payoff isn't funny, and later we can see it wasn't even much of a cliff. Caryn James praised Martin Short's efforts in the film, which she found otherwise forgettable, "Against the odds, he makes Pure Luck always painless and sometimes genuinely amusing. Martin Short can do anything, it seems, except find the right movies to star in." On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 15%, based on 13 reviews. References External links 1990s adventure comedy films 1990s comedy mystery films American adventure comedy films American comedy mystery films American remakes of French films Films directed by Nadia Tass Films set in Mexico Universal Pictures films 1991 comedy films Films with screenplays by Timothy Harris (writer) Films with screenplays by Herschel Weingrod 1990s English-language films 1990s American films