Starts Off Well, But Just Becomes Silly As It Goes On

Rating: 5/10 (22 August 2019)

You look at the cast and you have to be impressed. Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, John Candy - throw in John Larroquette and Judge Reinhold and a couple of others. It's a good cast of SNL veterans and others who would become fairly well known. You look at the plot and you realize it's nothing particularly original. It's about a group of misfits in the Army. There are lots of similar type stories. But the cast draws you in, because you expect a fair bit from them. And for the first half of the movie they deliver reasonably well. The story revolves around John and Russell (played by Murray and Ramis) - who both find themselves in dead end jobs, going nowhere and decide that the Army looks like an easy gig. So they join up. And it turns out to be not so easy. That's one surprising thing about that fairly good first half - it's funny at times, but it also has its moments of seriousness and John and Russell discover that the Army isn't all fun and games. It was decent enough. But then came the second half of the movie. Something happens at the point of the platoon graduating from the military academy - especially when this joke of a platoon ends up being given responsibility for a top secret new military weapon. After that I thought "Stripes" descended into silliness and started to take on almost a slapstick quality that just didn't appeal to me as much. It's not so much that I didn't find it believable - really, none of it is believable - but that it wasn't interesting and it stopped being fun.
The female characters in this are mostly there for window dressing. Even the female leads (PJ Soles and Sean Young) don't have a lot to do and really can't be taken seriously - they play cute MPs who end up as playthings for John and Russell, although Young gets to do a wee bit more serious stuff in the latter stages of the film. But most of the women you see in this are for eye candy more than anything - there's a lot of toplessness but little substance.
It's a middling sort of movie. I give it a 5/10.