Fewer Laughs Than A "Hogan's Heroes" Repeat

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 1999)

Hard to believe that just four years before this hideous mess, Steven Spielberg made one of the greatest movies ever in "Jaws." "1941" purports to a comedy, but except for the scene with Slim Pickens on the Japanese sub I watched this movie in stone-faced silence. What is so offensive about this movie is that Spielberg seems determined to go out of his way to show only *Americans* as silly idiots, whereas the Japanese sub crew is depicted as smarter, filled with honor and even wise enough to dispose of the token Nazi all by themselves (a trait which was lacking in every member of the Japanese government and military, all of whom were equally as brutal as their Nazi counterparts), and are allowed to get away in the end unscathed. I was still waiting to at least see the sub get theirs in the end (which would have made me at least come away learning to respect the film as a comic spoof), but no they're allowed to return while the closing shot is a gratuitous slam at the idea of American wartime unity. Film critic Richard Grenier put it best when he said, "The problem with the movie was that there were these Japanese who had just sunk a large part of the Pacific Fleet, There was a real war. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed. Spielberg had forgotten about that."
If I want to see WWII comedy, I'd rather watch reruns of "Hogan's Heroes" and "McHale's Navy" which at least never forgot which side was the sillier one more worthy of being parodied. "1941" has eyepopping sets and visual effects, but that only makes it no different than the largely witless "Casino Royale" of a decade earlier (that film at least is more interesting as a 60s curio).