Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to View

Rating: 2/10 (14 October 2012)

THIS REVIEW IS ON THE THEATRICAL CUT OF THE FILM
Spielberg, what horror have you wrought?
Buoyed by the success of 'Jaws' and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' (both films that I consider to be somewhat overrated), the young auteur Steven Spielberg decided that the time was right for a vanity project. The project? A screwball WWII film littered with numbing spectacles straight out of Cecil B. Demille's period epics.
On paper, such a project boasts great potential. One cannot deny that, amid all the atrocities and horrors of the Second World War, there was an underlining sense of heightened and morbidly hilarious tragedy that, in the right hands, would be the perfect fodder for farce. It also has the added benefit of attracting the adoration of critics for it's gutsy agenda and subject matter. Yet, through the lens of one of Earth's most naturally gifted filmmakers, it is an unparalleled abomination of comedy.
If one wanted to summarise in a mere four words just what is wrong with this film, I would humbly suggest that you use these so ordained vocables: 'IT NEVER SHUTS UP!' Every single second of '1941' is filled with explosions, car crashes, plane crashes, brawling, and gun fights. I gathered that the film was supposed to be a farce, but farces only really work when one has a sense of escalating catastrophe. With '1941', there is no sense of escalation because nothing really escalates; it's uninhibitedly mad from the get-go and it's uninhibitedly mad by the end. Indeed, the only vaguely quiet scenes in this film are those featuring the villains (Toshiro Mifune and the great Christopher Lee deserve to have their name associated with a better Spielberg picture than this), and even they are sullied by a grating cameo by Slim Pickens.
The controlled and demonstrably contrived anarchy of '1941' made the hour and fifty minutes it took to watch this film feel like the longest and most grueling one hour and fifty minutes of my life. It's not that I have a distaste for screwball shenanigans, considering that almost all of my favourite comedies in some shape or form incorporate such pantomimic elements of that titanic arena of absurdity that we call farce; it's more that I dislike comedies that have almost no concept of the constitutions of a good joke. Though such a thing is considered subjective, I dare you to deny that my definition is an all-encompassing one. The constitutions, or rather constitution, of a good joke is a sharp contrast. Take any joke, good or bad, and you'll find that the reason it is either good or bad is because the contrast between two separate ideas is either elegantly or poorly highlighted.
Well, the contrast in '1941' is very, very poorly highlighted. I'm guessing, from the film's narrative, that it was something along the lines of 'War is a serious business, but the participants are adult children'. Well, it gets the 'adult children' aspect right, what with the crew of a Japanese submarine emerging from the water with a naked night swimmer on their periscope and fighter pilots blowing up the petrol stations of innocent, elderly citizens to the sound of heroic themes by John Williams; and what with US military personal rioting in Hollywood Boulevard whilst a Benny Hill sex romp ensues between a zoot suit wearing dancer and a sex-crazed soldier (that culminates in what appears to be a rape... charming) and an officer having sex with a girl he fancies as the two pilot an aeroplane over a crowded city with reckless abandon; aaannnndddd what with a platoon shooting out lights in Hollywood Boulevard whilst people are still standing beneath them just because an air raid siren has sounded and a black out has not gone into immediate effect... AND WHAT WITH civilian patrolmen stationing themselves in Ferris Wheels that can somehow roll perfectly down peers just in case any 'Japs' show up on the horizon (which of course they do).
What it doesn't do is highlight anything resembling the reality of war, something the film sorely needed to do if it wanted to get a laugh out of us during the many elaborately choreographed slapstick sequences that I'm sure cost more money than the United States presently owes to China to film. Instead, we get innumerable scenes of intricate physical comedy that seems uncertain about whether it wants to emulate Jacques Tati or 'The Three Stooges'.
Perhaps I wouldn't mind so much if the film had some colourful dialogue that I could endlessly quote to befuddled acquaintances. But it doesn't. In fact, the film has so little wit that I'd swear it was a big-budgeted 'Death at a Funeral', but then I would be doing that film a disservice for failing to acknowledge it's ability to recognise a need for contrast. The only vaguely witty jokes in this film are the ones about ethnicity, and it's a bit of a sad thing when the best jokes that a big-budget film like this can cough up are to do with such a pedestrian topic.
And it's almost pitiful that the man responsible for such brilliant films as 'Duel', 'Schindler's List', and 'Minority Report' can produce something so obnoxiously unfunny. And I thought 'The Terminal' was bad...