Army and Navy snore

Rating: 1/10 (30 November 2013)

At the time he made this colossal turkey, Steven Spielberg was the new wunderkind on the block and after the massive successes of "Jaws" and "Close Encounters...", it seemed he couldn't miss. Armed with a massive budget (and trust me, you can see every dollar spent on the screen), with pet writer Robert Zemeckis on scripting duties he must have thought he couldn't go wrong. Unfortunately it's more a case of what could go right in this unfunny monument to excess, so bad is it, in fact, that the director has never attempted a full-out comedy ever since.
The premise of a rogue Japanese submarine, unaccountably with a German staff officer on board too, invading Hollywood is dumb, while the side by side, I hesitate to call them stories of a bullying tough-guy soldier terrorising a young jitterbugging couple, an out-of-his-box fighter pilot seeking a dog-fight every time he gets in the cockpit and lastly the misadventures of a frigid beauty who only gets turned on when in the vicinity of a plane are hackneyed and infantile. The U.S. teenage magazine "Mad" I think had to be an inspiration for this mess, hardly the basis for screen comedy (c.f. "Howard The Duck").
There are no characters worthy of the description in the entire movie, no central person to follow and most importantly no worthwhile jokes to make the viewer smile, never mind laugh. Spielberg's idea of the punch-line to a scene is to offer up a cast of thousands and a lot of bangs, crashes and explosions.
With mediocre acting too, this really is a plane-crash of a movie, once seen, instantly forgotten, as unfunny a comedy as the later "Pearl Harbour", on a similar subject was an unintentionally funny drama, these two wrongs not making a right!
War really is hell, as the saying goes - ditto this awfully bad movie.