Training Ground(hog) For What Came Later, But Otherwise An Ill-Paced Disaster

Rating: 2/10 (16 March 2009)

If you liked Memento, Caddyshack is worth seeing. The same technique of forgetting what you were doing thirty seconds after you begin doing it, and perpetually restarting from scratch seems to be the operating technique here. Except that it applies not to the characters in the film, but to the writer and director, Harold Ramis.
Caddyshack is a series of sketches that claim to be a movie, but are really far less than the sum of their parts. There are a few good comedy bits  surprisingly, Chevy Chase is good in an understated way that is cumulatively funnier as time goes by  and Rodney Dangerfield brings the frenetic quality and smart-alecky trademark schtick up front and center that is occasionally pretty good.
But the whole film never gets going. Now, I'm not someone who thinks that you have to have a John Sayles plot in a comedy. I'm fine with any amount of utterly improbable nonsense if it moves the comedy along. But that doesn't happen here. Stars are perpetually arriving, doing their little set piece, and then disappearing: so much so that I found myself saying, "it sure was funnier when ----------- was on screen  say, whatever happened to them anyway?" about a dozen times. Then, at some point with no relation to anything, they'd appear in a different scene and the process would repeat.
Part of the problem is that it's a damned GOLF MOVIE. What the hell? A movie aimed at the Animal House crowd about GOLF??? And the problem there is that there's no template to lampoon. Airplane! is, without a doubt, the funniest film in the last 40 years, mostly because it took the mickey out of all those turgid Airport movies that preceded it, and the whole disaster movie thing. It meant that the jokes could be quick, ceaseless and merciless, and it meant that you kept missing jokes because you were almost crying with laughter from the previous one.
In Caddyshack, the whole thing is endless setups for a single lame joke. Ramis does try the parody thing with a little incident in a swimming pool that references Jaws, but it takes five minutes to get through, and the joke has come and gone way before the punchline, which is then totally anticlimactic.
Probably the best way and reason to watch Caddyshack, apart from ninja training to learn to overcome suffering silently, is as a perspective on Groundhog Day, which is the SECOND funniest movie in the last 40 years, and for reasons that are entirely due to its own genius. It brings together three elements from Caddyshack: Ramis, again as writer producer; a groundhog; and Bill Murray, who, if you want to see evidence of progress of a great comedian, you need do no more than compare these two films, made 13 years apart.
In Caddyshack, Murray is a kind of template for what Jim Carrey started out as: a Jerry Lewis style goof that get laughs from, well, people who think Jerry Lewis is a genius, and gags that depend on what one can only call a "retard" persona, which is not funny. All three of these comedians managed to demonstrate at some point in their career that there was some brilliance and control in their comedy, and got way, way better results out of it: Murray in many films, especially Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation, and Broken Flowers; Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Truman Story and a few others; and Lewis in The King of Comedy  in its own way the THIRD funniest movie in the last 40 years. Somehow the effect of each of these was to make everything they'd done earlier all the more intolerable.