Misses The Point

Rating: 3/10 (18 April 2005)

Based on the incredibly popular novel by Joseph Heller, sporting Mike Nichols as director, and featuring a first rate cast that included a host of brilliant actors, CATCH-22 was one of the most highly anticipated films of its year. And it proved one of the most critically-despised box office disasters of the early 1970s. Almost every one loathed everything about it.
The story concerns a group of WWII bomber crews and support staff stationed on an island off the coast of Italy, on which they make bomb runs--but this is merely the peg on which Heller hung his savage satire on American bureaucracy. The film version, sadly, keeps the peg but manages to miss the rest.
Part of the problem here is that the humor of the novel is deeply tied into the way in which Heller tells his story--and it simply doesn't translate well into film. That aside, Buck Henry's adaptation is an absolute disaster: instead of rapid-fire, it is slow-crawl, and instead of sharp-fanged it is gap-toothed. Mike Nichol's direction is an equal miscalculation, for he approaches the material with an odd sense of detachment that effectively kills even the little bit that Henry's script had going for it to begin with.
Given all of this, the surprising thing about the movie is how well-cast it is and how good some of the performances are. You simply couldn't ask for a better Yossarian than Alan Arkin and the novel's Doc Daneeka might have been written with Jack Gilford in mind; Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkle, Paula Prentiss, Bob Newhart, and even Orson Wells are among the many who give the film what little force it has. But ultimately, even the best performances in the film can't get the show off the ground. It is dead on arrival.
The film is presently available on DVD, but the DVD package isn't anything to write home about; the film is well presented, but the commentary track is merely so-so and the rest of the bonuses are ho-hum. Although not, mercifully, as ho-hum as the extremely misguided film itself.
Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer