BEFORE: Another Chevy Chase comedy, which will lead me into Christmas movies tomorrow... Most of the cable channels have given up on running new movies, at least until January 1, so this week is a great chance for me to lower the number of movies on my list and make some progress - oh, yeah, and celebrate Christmas and stuff.
THE PLOT: Arms dealers vie to sell the most expensive and highest tech weapons to a South American dictator.
AFTER: Wow, this one's even more outdated than "Spies Like Us". The U.S. selling arms to South America is just so 80's, man...
Chevy Chase plays Eddie Muntz, an arms dealer who doesn't seem to have any conscience at all - but depends on his partner, Ray, (Gregory Hines), who wants to get out of the arms business and become a preacher of some kind. Muntz meets Harold DeVoto (Wallace Shawn), another arms dealer who's trying to sell the Peacekeeper drone planes, and when this guy kills himself, Muntz takes over to try and make the sale (because that's how these things work, apparently...) with the help of DeVoto's widow (Sigourney Weaver).
I guess this was supposed to be a satire of the weapons industry, and the U.S. military-industrial complex, but it doesn't really go far enough. Yeah, so the dictators are corrupt, and the arms dealers are unscrupulous, and the military unloads its inferior technology to other countries - so freakin' what?
The funniest part in the whole film is watching Gregory Hines lose his cool after a traffic accident with another man who won't let it go - when the other man starts trashing Hines' car, he pulls out a flamethrower from the trunk and torches the other car...
But other than that, there's not much to discuss. The film hasn't really aged well, and Chase is essentially playing the same smug character he played in "Caddyshack", only less effectively.
RATING: 3 out of 10 bazookas
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