Gung Ho (1986)

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Michael Keaton, Gedde Watanabe, George Wendt, Mimi Rogers

Have I Seen it Before: Actually, I don’t think I have. Odd, I know. I would have thought that Clean and Sober (1988) is the only Keaton film I had managed to avoid, and that’s mainly because I had heard it was a stone-cold bummer. Maybe I’ll come around to it eventually.

Did I Like It: Right from the outset, you’re probably anticipating that I’m going to give this movie more credit than it might be worth, and you might be right. Had anybody else played the role of Hunt Stevenson, the thorough blandness of the film might have been unavoidable. The film isn’t quite funny enough for a Bill Murray. It’s also not quite edgy enough for an Eddie Murphy*. With Keaton, he’s able to be just relatable enough (while also seeming like he could become unglued at any minute) that I enjoyed the film despite itself. There’s also plenty to be said for a film that gives Gedde Watanabe the opportunity to be something more than the caricature he’s most famous for in films like Sixteen Candles (1984) and UHF (1989). 

And yet, there is still that blandness at its core. It attempts to be a Capra film or a new age (which itself feels quaint), but between every technical choice throughout the film, the entire affair is so dated, one needs only look at a few scant seconds of it without any other context to guess when it was made. I would say that Howard was so committed to the ambition of proving himself as a director outside of his notoriety as a child star that he forgot to get much of a POV. I’d say that he grew out of that once people started forgetting about Opie, but even his best films betray a journeyman quality to his work.

*A quick search indicates both turned down the role.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, Mimi Rogers

Have I Seen It Before?: I was 12, going on 13 when the movie came out. If there was anyone for whom it was made, it was I.

Did I like it?: We all remember for about half an hour twenty years ago, we all latched on to the notion of the Austin Powers. Not because he was terribly funny, not because his throwback to a simpler age appealed to us, but mainly because he was a Gollum of catchphrases that we all could sort of do an impression of. Time passed, probably a mixture of 9/11 and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) happened, and we all moved on.

But as I continue my willy nilly re-watch of the Bond films (I will eventually force myself to watch Moonraker (1979) again, I swear), I thought it might be time to give Austin and company another shot. The first one had to be somewhat good, right?

Eh.

There is a slavish devotion to the work of directors Guy Hamilton, Terrence Young and Lewis Gilbert, along with the delightful production design of Ken Adam and the brassy sounds of John Barry, but there’s not a lot of wit in those references. It is merely showing us things that we might recognize from other films, in hopes that it might elicit something resembling a laugh from the audience. This feels like the intermediate infection point between the sublime joy of films like Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad! (1988) and the witless pains of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Tragically this film seems just as interested as lovingly referencing the early Bond films as it is in adopting an affect more akin to Casino Royale (1967).

Please, don’t make me re-watch the first Casino Royale feature. I beg of you.

And the humor that is on display here isn’t much to write home about. It aims at the lowest common denominator, and while that may make this reviewer read as stuffier than he might hope, I can only offer this in my defense: I remember laughing so hard in the 1990s that I hit my head at the sequence in the bathroom with Tom Arnold when Austin (Myers*) screams at a henchman, “Who does Number Two work for?” Today? Nearly nothing. I didn’t think the Swedish-made Penis enlarger was terribly funny on first blush, so the repeated call backs and the decades have done it no favors. Even the zany sort of non-sequiturs that absolutely rely on surprise to delight have long since lost their luster.

But I’m sure the series is just warming up, right?

*Still keeping a tenuous grasp on his Peter Sellers worship, although this will be the final film before the experiment completely escapes from the lab.