A movie the Duke must have liked.

Rating: 1/10 (21 August 2000)

The saddest thing about 'Catch-22', if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, is not that Mike Nichols, a master of dark comedy, as his later 'Carnal Knowledge' would prove, abandons satire in favour of deadening spectacle. Or that he turns an astonishing all-star cast into jittering, unfunny puppets. Or that he completely misses the tone of Heller's 'classic' (and, boy, does Nichols think it's a classic). Or that the two modes he 's chosen to tell the story - ironic black comedy and subjective nightmare - cancel each other out. Or that he thinks European cinema is automatically superior to American, so that he jettisons the lessons of Kubrick, Lester and Altman, in favour of ponderous, undigested globs of Antonioni and Fellini.

No, the saddest thing about 'Catch-22' is that its heart is reactionary; that, unlike 'Dr. Strangelove' or 'M*A*S*H', Nichols pathologises his delusional hero, and not war, neutering any potential satire. And, at the height of the Vietnam War, that was unforgivable.