Even worse than I remember

Rating: 1/10 (16 May 2017)

I remember really looking forward to this movie when it came out. It was hyped like crazy and it starred pretty much everyone I thought was funny at the time. I also remember sitting there trying to will myself to laugh as it sunk in what a terrible movie it was.
I recently re-watched it, and it's even worse than I remembered, because even the stuff that was mildly entertaining 40 years ago hasn't aged well.
Where to start? One word: cocaine. That's the only thing that can possibly explain the frenetic misfire that is this movie. First of all, there's an absurd number of characters in an absurd number of subplots. On top of that, the subplots have bizarre details thrown in. For example, Treat Williams' "hilarious rapist" (rape is funny, right?) character has a weird phobia of eggs. What does this have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing.
The movie relies excessively on Three Stooges-style spit takes and prat falls. There's also a lot of screaming: "Japs!", "Invasion!", "Someone help! (this guy is trying to rape me)".
This time, I watched the extended version, and even at 2 1/2 hours (!!), it seemed like a lot of stuff was left out. A couple of the threads are wrung out in excruciating details while others seem to have missing chunks. There's a big build up to Warren Oats' appearance, but then it just comes and goes. Did he have more scenes on the cutting room floor? One guy has a ventriloquist's dummy for....some reason. Did they plan to do something more with it? like, something funny? How exactly did John Belushi end up flying around alone "looking for Japs"?
So much of the humor is badly misplaced. I mentioned the attempted rape. We're not talking Brutus chasing Olive oil. We're talking Treat Williams dragging a woman under a car as she screams for help - and this is basically played for laughs, with another woman disappointed he's not trying to rape her. Also, the big fight is clearly supposed to be the zoot suit riots (which actually happened in 1943). There was absolutely nothing funny about those. Soldiers and white civilians were straight up assaulting Mexican-American youths while the authorities looked the other way, or even joined in.
A solid half of the movie is devoted to destruction of property. In fact, I'm pretty sure Spielberg started with a list of who he wanted in the move and another list of the things he wanted to destroy and just sort of wrote the movie around them. All this destruction was impressive when the movie was made, but now the whole thing literally looks like a Universal Studios tour.
I can't think of another example of this much talent being wasted in a single movie. There was all the hot comic talent at the time: Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, John Belushi, Tim Matheson, etc, and classic stars like Slim Pickens, Christopher Lee, and Japanese star Toshiro Mifune, and lots of other big names at the time, like Nancy Allen and Treat Williams. Not to mention a few characters recycled form Spielberg's other movies. Everyone was tripping over themselves to be in a Spielberg movie. It took real work for that cast of characters to turn in something this awful.
Weirdly, John Williams' score is quite good. Too bad it wasn't used for a better movie.