Viking Night: 1941
By Bruce Hall
February 25, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It’s a good thing Steven Spielberg kept making movies. If 1941 had been his last project, it might not have been enough to diminish the greatness of Jaws or Close Encounters, but it would have made the Posthumous Lifetime Achievement award a lot harder to hand out. It doesn’t exactly take a brave man to pile on this already much maligned cinematic atrocity. That trail has been blazed, and the ruts are worn deep. But you know what? I had to sit through the damn thing last night, and I swear on all that’s holy - I will not suffer alone.
The story is (very) loosely based on something that actually happened during World War II, adding the fundamental concept of a Japanese submarine surfacing in Los Angeles harbor and causing a citywide panic. It’s not exactly gold, but if it were pitched to me as a comedy starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, with special appearances by Robert Stack, Ned Beatty and John candy - I’d have listened. And had Universal Pictures been able to look into the future, they would also have known that the eventual writers of Back to the Future and Conan the Barbarian were responsible for the story. They’d have listened, too.
And who knows, maybe they did. Maybe they had a psychic on hand, or a crystal ball or magic mirror that allowed them to see this, along with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and they considered this to be a slam dunk. But of course we know this can’t be true because if it were, they’d also have seen what a colossal piece of shit this film was going to be. In fact, what surprises me most isn’t the 32% approval rating over at Rotten Tomatoes. What surprises me is that this many people liked it at all. But please - don’t rely (entirely) on my sparkling wit to decide how much you will also hate 1941, because I want to explain it to you in loving detail.
It saddens me that between this movie and Airplane, the non-Spielberg movie does a better job referencing Jaws as it opens. The same actress runs down the same stretch of beach and into the same span of water, but instead of getting mauled by a shark, she gets to ride bareback on a Japanese submarine as it surfaces in Los Angeles harbor. The scene that follows introduces her captain (Toshiro Mifune), the crew, and a conspicuously out of place Nazi conspirator (Christopher Lee), all looking for glory just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They decide that the best place to strike the enemy would be Hollywood, so they set out to find it in order to blow it to bits.
And well they should, based on the rest of the film. It’s supposed to be a comedy but most of the jokes either don’t land, or stay in the air longer than they should, only to land miles off target. So for 118 minutes, we follow approximately 118 characters around Los Angeles while they engage in a wide variety of shenanigans largely unrelated to Japan, or submarines, or anything remotely resembling comedy in general. It’s not hard to imagine how quickly invasion rumors could get out of control, and how (given the passage of enough time) you could mine that for something funny. But the only place 1941 is interested in digging are the go to spots for most ‘70s ensemble comedies – obvious sight gags, rampant sexism and racial humor more awkward than an elephant on roller skates.
Consider the characters. Despite their top billing, Aykroyd doesn’t figure much into the story as a boneheaded motor pool tech, and Belushi isn’t asked to do much more than grunt and twitch his way through what is essentially the same character he played in Animal House, but as a mentally divergent fighter pilot. Veteran actor Ned Beatty appears as a squirrely seaside homeowner with a submarine problem, and Treat Williams is a horny serviceman whose entire reason for being is because the screenwriters thought rapists are people, too. There are a lot more people in this movie, but none of them really mean anything or have much function other than to run around screaming, trying to have sex with each other and making forced ethnic jokes whenever better dialogue was unavailable. Everyone is a walking punch line, but we’re never sure what the joke is.
Beatty’s nattering wife won’t tolerate guns in the house, so guess what ends up in her house before the end of the movie, and guess how big it is? Williams hates eggs, so guess what he ends up face down in before the end of the film? Nancy Allen likes to have sex in planes, so guess what her entire character arc revolves around? And by the way, what the hell does any of this have to do with the war? 1941 is a series of half-baked set pieces and lowest common denominator gags that would barely have amused me when I was ten. Even John Williams’ trademark brass happy score feels lazy, chugging inevitably and obliviously along as though we’re all having a nice time, except we’re just NOT.
I wish there was a coherent plot, or any logical sequence of events that I could specifically point to as flaws, but the absence of these things happens to BE the film’s weakest point. With such a legendary director, a talented cast, a more than ample budget and Oscar-nominated special effects, you’d think 1941 would have amounted to more than this. Instead, what it feels like is the kind of reckless, heedless piece of garbage a man makes when he’s got so much juice that nobody can stop him from making whatever movie he wants. Call this Spielberg’s Sucker Punch if you want, because it’s that bad. It really is a good thing he kept making movies, because if he’d stopped here, he wouldn’t be nearly as loved or respected as he is today.