THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 16, 1994 TAG: 9408170585
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E9 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
DID BILL CLINTON take a look at this movie before he cooled down on the idea of invading Haiti? The idea of Pauly Shore, the baby-talking Valley Boy dude of MTV, joining the U.S. Army is not one to make us sleep easier at night (although it may well put you to sleep in the theater).
To be perfectly fair, ``In the Army Now'' is likable enough for Shore fans. Shore is the son of Mitzi Shore, owner of the famous Comedy Store in Los Angeles, and Sammy Shore, the comic. He has learned something about comic timing but not much about acting. Unfortunately, this movie requires more of the latter than the former.
His abrasive qualities have been tempered to play your everyday fish-out-of-water. He's occasionally very funny.
The basic problem is not Shore but the script. Shore's droll style, which requires him to retain a stone face no matter what madness happens around him, is all wrong for the typical service comedy. Rubber-face over-reactions are needed for this type comedy to work.
Every comic from Charlie Chaplin to Jerry Lewis has played the staple military comedy. Abbott and Costello did it with ``Buck Privates'' and ``In the Navy.'' Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis did it for both the Navy and the paratroopers. Bob Hope had his turn. So did Bill Murray in ``Stripes'' and Goldie Hawn in ``Private Benjamin.'' And who can forget the most stereotypical, Andy Griffith's ``No Time for Sergeants''?
The idea is always the same - the goof-up dummy who flunks at military discipline emerges as an unlikely hero. The generals are amazed. The enemy is daunted. The audience should howl.
In this outing, Shore and his nerdish pal sign up for the Army Reserves when they find out there is pay involved. Shore reasons that ``it's sorta like signing up for a health spa - only you get paid.''
Thinking it's safe, they sign up for the water purification outfit. They are promptly sent to the Chad desert to participate in a war with Libya. They team up with Lori Petty (of ``A League of Their Own'') as a girl who would like to be Rambo and David Alan Grier (of TV's ``In Living Color'') as a neurotic dentist and end up knocking out a secret Scud base that had eluded all the smarter soldiers.
Eight writers worked on ``In the Army Now.'' Given their number, it is surprising that they stole so many cliches. These jokes were old when the Greeks marched off to war. One by one, the familiar routines are trotted out. There's the one about the guys walking in circles in the desert. There's the one about the buzzard waiting for them to die. There's the scene when one of them dives into the sand, thinking it's water.
It's small wonder that a camel steals the movie.
The film is funnier in its first half, when Shore and friends are in basic training. Predictably, he is chagrined when he has a female drill sergeant. (Bob Hope played the same scene decades ago. So did Donald O'Connor in ``Francis Joins the WACS.'') The sergeant, in unlikely casting, is played by Lynn Whitfield, who won awards for the title role in ``The Josephine Baker Story'' for HBO.
Things get a bit too heavy, and slow, when Pauly's foursome are lost in the desert, literally walking around in circles.
Perhaps the funniest thing about this movie is that the Army and the Defense Department gave full cooperation to its filming. Several $30 million Apache helicopters were used. The desert scenes were shot near Yuma, Ariz., and the basic training sequences at Fort Sill in Lawton, Okla.
The finale has a surprisingly expensive and overproduced look, complete with real explosives. The realism works against the comedy. Big production isn't needed, or desirable. All we want are laughs.
Shore is much more mass-oriented in this movie than in ``Encino Man'' but not as funny as he was in ``Son-In-Law.'' Still, it seems that every comic has to make at least one service comedy. With the Disney outfit putting its Ernest franchise to rest, it was apparently Shore's turn. Is Jim Carrey next?
About the best that can be said for ``In the Army Now'' is that it's actually quite harmless. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
KELVIN JONES
Lori Petty, Pauly Shore, David Alan Grier and Andy Dick are behind
enemy lines in ``In the Army Now.''
Graphic
MOVIE REVIEW
``In the Army Now''
Cast: Pauly Shore, Lori Petty, Andy Dick, David Alan Grier, Lynn
Whitfield
Director: Daniel Petrie Jr.
Screenplay: Ken Kaufman, Stu Krieger, Daniel Petrie Jr., Fax
Bahr, Adam Small
Music: O. Nicholas Brown
MPAA rating: PG (language, Pauly in his underwear)
Mal's rating: One 1/2 stars
Locations: Movies 10 in Chesapeake; Janaf and Main Gate in
Norfolk; Kemps River and Lynnhaven 8 in Virginia Beach
by CNB