Sarcasm rolls off the tongue like a second language...

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 1999)

Have you ever had those moments where you said exactly what you wanted to say, in exactly the right tone, at exactly the right time? Bill Murray has those moments. We're lucky that he has so many of them on screen. Sure, in Stripes, or any other movie Murray has ever made, he works from a script, but among all big-screen comedians, only Murray has the ability to make those carefully memorized lines seem like he came up with them on the spur of the moment. Stripes was the first movie which used this aspect of his screen persona to its best advantage.
The appeal of Stripes is plain. Can aging hipsters get it together and fulfill the promise that they once saw in themselves without becoming squares? The movie says, "Yes," and places Winger and Ziske in that veritable graveyard for hipness, the armed forces. The hook: They're too smart to be grunts, but not too smart to learn some lessons. That gap is where the humor comes from. By turns this movie looks down on the service life and shows the advantages of its discipline. Make no mistake, however, it's the hipsters' show. They walk away the heroes.