War Drums Beat, Bodies Fly, Eyeballs Roll, Viewers Wince.

Rating: 4/10 (27 January 2013)

After the release, John Belushi wore to a party a button reading "John Belushi: 1949 - 1941." That's how much of a failure this story of the Los Angeles panic in the wake of Pearl Harbor is.
It's all done with brio but if Spielberg missed on opportunity for low-brow humor anywhere along the way, I missed it. If someone tosses eggs to a cook, the eggs miss and splat on the counter. If someone pours coffee into a cup, most of it sloshes onto the table. Belushi is piloting his P-40 through the Grand Canyon. When he gets a yen for a Coke, he smashes off the top of the bottle and most of it gets on his face, although a bit of it dribbles into his mouth, drowning the cigar stub implanted there.
There are fights, flights, jitterbug dances, mockery of a Japanese submarine, beautiful young women wearing stockings and garter belts, an abundance of socks in the jaw, collapsing towers, crazed motorcyclists, and all of it thrown at the viewer at a frenzied pace.
It was all done at least as well, if more deliberately, by Laurel and Hardy. Some comedies, especially those with big budgets, seem to fail for similar reasons. "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World" and "What's New Pussycat" seem to equate energy and speed with humor, and the two are just not necessarily the same. A genuinely fast comedy can be funny -- "His Girl Friday" or "One Two Three" -- but speed can't be substituted for well-designed gags. It's just not especially amusing when two men boost Belushi up onto the wing of his airplane and he rolls off the other side. We've seen it a dozen times, though most often with horses.
And as I watched this for the second time, my mind drifting a little, I began wondering exactly how many of the period references and spoofs would register with younger viewers. They'll undoubtedly get the opening allusion to "Jaws", but will they know that the zoot suit riots were real, or recognize the musical tribute to the score of "Patton", or get the incarnation of the Andrew Sisters? The funniest scenes are those in which a firm declaration is immediately contradicted by events. "I'll have no guns in this house," declares a housewife -- and the barrel of a 40 mm. cannon comes crashing through the front door. "There will be no bombs dropped on this airfield!", General Robert Stack announces during a speech, and a bomb accidentally dropped from a parked B-17 rolls toward the stand and explodes. But that's the height that subtlety reaches in this comedy.
Great cast caught up in a pointless whirlwind of lunacy.