Just not my idea of a great comedy.

Rating: 5/10 (7 May 2012)

No idea why this movie is considered to be a genre classic really. I don't know, perhaps I needed to be around at 1970 to fully understand its appeal and appreciate it, since it certainly was a popular movie at the time, that even had an even more successful TV-series following it up, only 2 years later.
Thing that the movie is known and praised for, is its heavy anti-war message in it. Well, not a message really but it makes a statement by turning a war situation into something comical. Perhaps this was something that really spoke to people at the time because of America's involved with the Vietnam war. In that regard, this movie is perhaps being a bit too much a product of its time and has lost it relevance and impact.
But that does not make a bad movie of course. What does make this movie quite bad is that it simply isn't very fun or funny to watch at all. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I chuckled just once. The rest of the movie mostly consists out of people talking over each other and behaving incredibly immature.
This was another real problem I had with this movie; All of the characters behaved like a bunch of brats and really not one of them was being likable enough for me. This was perhaps the biggest reason why I just couldn't ever enjoy watching this movie.
But really, another big problem of the movie for me was that it didn't even featured a main story in it. It made this movie come across as a real pointless one, that was never being good, interesting or funny enough. It just isn't going anywhere with any of it. Perhaps it was to show the whole pointlessness of war but this doesn't make the movie any more pleasant or good to follow. Maybe it would had also helped if the movie did actually showed some of its war but now I really never had the feeling as if the movie was taking place during a war situation.
The cast-list sound interesting, with people such as Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Robert Duvall and Rene Auberjonois in it but most of them were still pretty big unknowns at the time and their roles also aren't all that big. The movie doesn't have one main character in it but it instead focuses on a whole bunch of them, for an equal amount of time. This could work, if all of the characters would had been great or fun ones but that really wasn't the case for this movie.
Not a completely horrible movie but not a very great or enjoyable one either. No way I will be ever seeing this one again!
5/10
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