Just Look Away: McHALE’S NAVY

“Remember to try tonight’s drink special: Stolen Vodka Surprise. We stole Vladikov’s vodka. Surprise!”

This 1997 action/comedy (ugh, I threw up in my mouth a little) movie has a 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where only 36% of the audience report liking it.

For those of us too young to remember, McHale’s Navy was a television sitcom that ran for five years (1962-1966). It was about the misfit crew of a PT boat in the Pacific Theater of World War II. The cast included Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine, and stalwart character actors like Tim Conway, Joe Flynn, Carl Ballantine, and Gavin McLeod (yes, Captain Stubing from The Love Boat).

The crew of PT 73 were patriotic, and defended themselves when attacked, but otherwise saw the war as an opportunity to make as much money as possible off colonists, islanders, and their fellow sailors.

I wish I could tell you that the movie’s screenplay was by a famous writer who went on to do terrific things, but I can’t. The director, Bryan Spicer, mostly directs television these days – and works on shows that I really like, so that’s a basis for a recommendation.

I guess.

The movie stars some fine comedians like Bruce Campbell, French Stewart, and David Allan Greer. It also stars Tim Curry, Debra Messing, and Dean Stockwell.

Ernest Borgnine has a cameo role.

So the cast is terrific – leaving aside how you might feel about Tom Arnold, who plays the lead.

I’ll tell you what it’s about, why it’s so godawful after the jump.

Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale retired from the US Navy to the Caribbean.

Yes, I know it’s unusual for Lieutenant Commanders to have enough years in service to retire, but that’s the screenplay.

He makes his living selling “McHale’s Mai Tai… McHale’s Ale… McHale’s Girls of the San Ysidro Islands calendar.” So, basically, he’s a scam artist and a booze hound who supplies his old shipmates with contraband.

Then his old nemesis, now the second-best terrorist in the world, Major Vladikov, takes over an island and starts building nuclear missile silos. McHale recruits his old crew to man his vintage PT boat, and they wage a personal war against Vladikov’s terrorist forces.

In case the Rotten Tomatoes score wasn’t a big enough clue, this movie sucks.

I’m too young to have seen the TV show in prime time, but several of the places where I grew up showed it in afternoon syndication. When my oldest friend went to the Army officer’s basic course for the Military Police, he and his buddies gathered in his room in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters to watch it after training. So, it was part of my life.

I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m totally hung up on film adaptations staying true to their source material. I’m not, at all. What’s important is that the adaptation stay true to the spirit of the source material, while keeping enough details the same to please the fans.

McHale’s Navy (the movie) doesn’t.

The TV show was set during a war, and still managed to downplay violence. Hardly anyone ever died on-screen (an in-depth analysis of how film-makers clarify morality in violent movies is a whole other essay). Whole episodes might go by without a shot fired. Granted, it was often racist, but it was made in a less enlightened decade, too.

The movie is about a war on terror.

In the TV show, the crew of the PT 73 knew that Captain Binghamton wanted to shut down their illicit activities – because they were illicit activities. They still respected his rank and accepted his orders. In the movie, he’s just a cigar-smoking, officious, jerk who “sank the Love Boat.” He’s painted as incompetent. The TV show was set during a war. The movie throws that baby out with the bathwater, abandons the Pacific Ocean, and plops itself down in the contemporary Caribbean.

Those changes rob the film of any real connection to the source material.

So what, if anything, did the producers and production companies get from hanging the name of a 30-year-old TV series on this film?

It beats the crap out of me. If they wanted people who recognized the title, they should have made something closer to the series. If they wanted to make an action-comedy set in the Caribbean that involved a PT boat, I’m sure they could have come up with a better title and some different character names.

Plus, Tom Arnold is just not cut out for this kind of role.

He can play cowardly, greedy, scumbags, TV talk show hosts with anger management issues, and idiotic family men, but daring action hero is outside his range. I’ll tell you about a story that I read about in Bruce Campbell’s awesome autobiography. Mr. Campbell says that when they finished shooting a scene, Tom Arnold immediately walked off the set (in Jalisco, Mexico) and into his air-conditioned trailer.

Ernest Borgnine, in comparison, was 80 years old during shooting, and he would sit in a folding chair under a palm tree in the intense heat to talk with anybody who wanted to hang out with him.

It’s possible, of course, that Mr. Arnold was conducting business related to the film that he co-produced, but if I was co-producing a film, I’d put my heart and soul into it. I’d be on set longer than anyone else in the cast. If I was also playing a military leader, I’d spend as much time with the actors who play the members of my unit as possible, too.

For my money (and I wanted mine back after I paid to see this), they should have set the film during WWII, and let Bruce Campbell play McHale. David Allan Greer could have still played Ensign Charles Parker, Tim Conway’s role from the TV series. Granted, the US Navy wasn’t racially integrated back then, but plenty of African-Americans served in the US military.

Overall, I have to say that Tom Arnold, Dean Stockwell, and Tim Curry are miscast (Stockwell should have played the bad guy), the directing is lackluster (“just follow Tom Arnold around” doesn’t count as direction), the secondary characters aren’t well developed, the plot is weak, the humor isn’t funny, and the action doesn’t matter. Even if you don’t care about the source material, you should Just Look Away from this.