I perfectly understand the impulse to satirize Cold War nuclear dealings. How do you work for peace by building missiles, Ronald? And released at the mad height of Reaganomical autocracy, this muddy blotch on the scintillating filmography of a great modern director aspires to be a sharp, shrewd, and audacious satire of the global arms race, but it rarely seizes me, or seemingly any audience, on any considerable comic or intellectual level. The movie starts promisingly enough with a commercial mocking the arms industry, a promo for the Luckup Industries "Peacemaker," a fighter drone guaranteed to "preserve our way of life," with shots of families and children in the background. There's a stroke of Dr. Strangelove as the company executives thrash out promotional schemes for the plane, but the fanatical boss wants a more hard-hitting ad crusade, something like, "Why do I fly it? On account of it kills."
While the film plainly expects this brand of send-up to be shrewd and slashing, the film never takes any of it very far at all. Most frequently, the calculated gags seem too solemn. Not even Chevy Chase's peddling of military wares is ever very funny, though a booby-trapped urinal is clearly intended to be. Yes, Chevy Chase. And Wallace Shawn and Richard Libertini, all hilarious people. Libertini plays an immensely wealthy arms merchant who explains how recent changes to federal law not only legalize bribes to foreign dictators, but make those bribes tax deductible.
But no one concerned appears to have had any clue where the film's tone should've been pitched. The black comedy approach is merely dealt with from time to time. The scathing digs at the arms industry are haphazard. The humor varies from the relatively keen to the dumb to the utterly absent. What is Weaver's character designed to be anyway? The widow of the Luckup sales rep whose deal is successfully taken over by Chase, one moment she is a matchless fraud, the next she's a brokenhearted widow, and thereafter that she's pursuing Chase and surrendering herself to the General.
And Gregory Hines, an ex-fighter pilot now undergoing a religious crisis of conscience. After years of capitalizing off the wholesaling of death, he out of the blue finds religious conviction. Is this meant as a parody of born-again fanatics? Or is it just a narrative expedient to get us to the movie's utterly boring climactic warfare? Whatever the case may be, both actors are significantly wasted in their distracted roles. I would've been delighted to see this one and leave calling it unluckily misread or gravely undervalued, but the thing's an utter muddle most of the time.
