A Movie Only Neville Sinclair Could Love!

Rating: 1/10 (26 March 2020)

Lots of reviewers have already pointed out how shallow, ugly, tasteless and unfunny this massively annoying little movie really is. What I want to do is examine some of the underlying themes by comparing it to a movie from the early Nineties that I really loved, THE ROCKETEER.
These two movies have so much in common, yet they're very different. The Rocketeer was a feelgood popcorn film aimed at a family audience. Hail Caesar is an art house movie aimed at the elite. Yet both of them are period pictures that both spoof and celebrate classic Hollywood. Both movies feature a main character who is supposed to be a legendary movie star, a sexy screen idol at the height of his career. Both Baird Whitlock in Hail Caesar and Neville Sinclair in Rocketeer are quickly revealed to be very different from the heroic characters they play onscreen.
So here's where it gets interesting. The bland family movie actually presents a much darker, more disturbing, and arguably more honest look at Hollywood than the hip satire. With Baird Whitlock, the Coen brothers cop out. He's not a bad man, he's just stunningly self-involved, childishly naive, weak and silly. It's purely accidental (and supposedly hilarious) when he gets mixed up with a bunch of Communists trying to infiltrate Hollywood. They kidnap him and lecture him on Communist doctrine. And he sits there. Looking confused. And that's hilarious, really funny. Only not. At all!
Now look at Neville Sinclair. He's nobody's pawn. He's a Nazi spy and he likes it. He's genuinely cruel, cunning, sadistic and brutal. He doesn't think twice about hiring mob killers to help him cover up his treason. He revels in his plans to bring down America. And you know what? He's also a sexual predator who very nearly pulls off a Harvey style rape scene with a genuinely innocent and appealing young ingenue. None of that is funny, but see, it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be real, and it is. And it feels even tougher and more honest now than it was in 1991!
I'm a big CLOCKWORK ORANGE fan, and I wish that George Clooney and the Coen brothers could be strapped into their seats and forced to viddy THE ROCKETEER over and over again, until they begin to feel very, very sick!