In this thrilling
sequel to Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman’s Babe receives a massive bill
from Laurence Olivier’s Szell for dental services performed in the first movie.
It is revealed that during the events of the first film, Szell, the escaped
Nazi war criminal, has an actual dental practice to distract from his evil
escapades, and to cover his tracks just in case Dustin Hoffman’s Babe ever
escaped and went to the police, Szell had entered Babe into his appointment
book at his practice and noted that he had seen him and had performed extensive
and much needed dental work on our hero. And since Szell died at the end of Marathon
Man, nobody is left who can attest to the facts of the case (except our
hero, who has not paid the bill, so nobody believes him), and as it turns out,
when Szell died and his practice closed, all of his outstanding bills were
turned over to a bill collections agency, and having gotten everyone else to
pay up, Dustin Hoffman’s character is the only one left on the list, with an
enormous unpaid bill for them to collect. And wouldn’t you know it, but our
hero’s dental insurance refuses to pay the bill because he was not specifically
covered under their tortured by escaped Nazi war criminals who torture you by
drilling your teeth out plan: a plan they offer, but our hero decided he
probably would never need to be covered for such a thing, so he didn’t sign up
for it. (That just goes to show you: you should always get every insurance
policy offered to you just in case! Brought to you by Geico! Just kidding.)
So what happens
is just what you’d expect: Nazi war criminals always hire the most brutal bill
collectors, and so these guys chase Dustin Hoffman around everywhere he goes
trying to collect the bill; and when they finally catch him, they torture him
by breaking his kneecaps and other assorted varieties of persuasion methods to
get him to pay, saying each time: “Is it paid? Is it paid? We’ll stop doing
this to you when you can tell us it is paid.” So finally our hero agrees to
pay, but he says he needs to go to the bank. So he gets the money to pay the
bill in a giant sack of quarters and arranges to meet the bill collectors in an
abandoned sewage treatment plant, where he dumps the quarters onto their heads,
causing the quarters to all bounce onto the floor and into the untreated sewage, where our bad guy
bill collectors, after weighing themselves down with pockets full of quarters, dive in to get the rest and they all drown in raw sewage. And our hero,
triumphant once more, exits the facility and walks down the street. The End.
(Or is it the
end? Because the collections agency never hears from their agents again, and
they keep hounding our hero with threatening phone calls and demanding payment
this time in untraceable diamonds, and…)
(You know: I
wonder. If you needed to hire a dentist to torture someone for you like in Marathon
Man, would your dental insurance cover that, or would you need a new
policy? Szell did it himself, but what if you needed that sort of thing done
and you’re not a skilled torturing dentist? Is that covered? It is dental work,
after all…)
