McHale's Navy

So I just finished up with Down Periscope, so I'm off to the other Navy comedy. I have no idea why this is rated so low.

It's silly, but it's a comedy and is supposed to be. I can watch this one every so often and it's still funny. Relax a little bit and laugh, it's not real.

And it's not supposed to be. There are quite a few bad reviews of this movie -- bad acting, thin script, etc. All I got to say is get over it. This is one of those silly movies that you watch on a lazy summer day. The good guys win and the bad guys don't. Like I said it's not rocket science. However, if I had a choice between this movie and one of those equally implausible big budget Mission Impossible movies, I'll take McHale's Navy.

OK for starters, this movie deserves far better than the 3.8 it currently holds, hence my 8/10. In truth, this film is a great piece of entertainment, and I can think of few films that are as mindless as they are funny. This is not meant to be Oscar material, but succeeds in entertaining from beginning to end.

Bruce Campbell of course makes this worth seeing by himself, but the rest of the cast hold their own. Tom Arnold usually is seen as a bad indicator of quality, but his cheesy dialog has its moments. Rent it, buy it, just watch it, and judge for yourself. It will not be a waste of time.

The original series starred Ernest Borgnine fresh off his film career which included an Academy Award winning performance as MARTY. The real stars of the show were Tim Conway and Joe Flynn, two comics with perfect timing. The rest of the crew was basically just wall paper (wall paper does have it's place, Gavin MacLeod made a career out of playing wall paper in this program, THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, and THE LOVE BOAT). The humor of the show required that Conway or Flynn or both be on screen to get a laugh. Like many TV shows of the time, two theatrical features were made (in color) and the second only with Conway and Flynn. A remake of the whole thing flops mainly because of the lack of comic timing (a mix of slapstick and vaudeville) that Conway and Flynn brought to the original. About the same time as this remake Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd attempted to remake another service related TV comedy SGT. BILKO. Martin and Ackroyd have timing and still flopped with the genre. So maybe the two shows could only be made at the time they were made with the people who made them. That makes them really special and why Nick at Nite and TV Land will have little competition from new Hollywood. Note: If you have any original ideas move to Hollywood, apparently there are no writers in Hollywood with original ideas. They can use you.

McHale's Navy was a TV series in the 1960s which was pretty good mostly because all the characters worked well together. The goofy moments came off because the actors were familiar with each other, and they could play off each other.

The movie version on the other hand, totally abandons the formula that the TV series used, and tries to be a comedy version of a Steven Segal movie. It totally bombs at every level. None of the actors in this movie seem to be into their roles, and it feels like nobody ever saw even one episode of McHale's Navy. The bits that are stolen from the TV series are just totally flat when this cast tries them.

This movie has a great cast of comedy actors, except for the lead actor, Tom Arnold. It should have been funny, but Tom Arnold is the kiss of death for anything he touches. When a great cast of comics is following a really dull and untalented actor like Tom Arnold, what you get is this very boring and unfunny movie.