Written by Allen and Mickey Rose, the film is about a bumbling New Yorker who, after being dumped by his activist girlfriend, travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest revolution.

The film opens with Howard Cosell's coverage of the assassination of the president of the fictional "banana republic" of San Marcos and a coup d'état that brings Gen. Emilio Molina Vargas to power.

In court, Mellish tries to defend himself from a series of incriminating witnesses, including a reigning Miss America and a middle-aged African-American woman claiming to be J. Edgar Hoover in disguise.

Uncredited appearances include Sylvester Stallone as a subway thug #1, Mary Jo Catlett as a woman in a hotel lobby[4] and Tino García in an undisclosed role.

[5] Included in the scene is a parody television advertisement for New Testament cigarettes with a Catholic priest (Dan Frazer) promoting the fictitious brand while performing the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Here is no little man surviving with a wan smile and a shrug, but a runty, wise-mouthed guy whose initial impulses toward cowardice seem really heroic in the crazy order of the way things are."

He concluded: "Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.

[13] Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin thought that "the gags seem a little brighter than in Take the Money," but also found the scattershot humor "too undisciplined and disparate.