This Looks Mediocre! Sgt. Bilko (1995)

In Going Too Far, his deeply personal, deeply self-indulgent and deeply self-aggrandizing history of twentieth century comedy, Tony Hendra posited the live shows of his National Lampoon crew as the glorious, transcendent embodiment of countercultural comedy at its realest, most culturally significant and spiritually profound. 

If The National Lampoon in its myriad, endlessly romanticized forms represented the apex of countercultural comedy in the second half of the twentieth century in Hendra’s ferociously self-centered viewpoint, then the bleak nadir came when a crass, lowbrow movie about lovable police officers called Police Academy became an unexpected smash and the rude and ramshackle template for an entire plague of raunchy, lowbrow romps that aspired to do for various fields what Police Academy did for law enforcement. 

When I read Hendra’s book many years back, when life seemed less grim and apocalyptic, this struck me as patently ridiculous. Police Academy may be a garbage movie and it may not set a wonderful precedent to depict police officers as zany underdogs so gloriously inept that you can’t help but root for them but it seemed unfair to depict such a silly, stupid trifle as an unforgivable desecration of anti-authoritarian comedy. 

I feel a little differently these days. I’m still not on board with Hendra’s deification of the comedy he and his buddies created in the wild and rebellious primes of their respective careers but making a ubiquitous hit movie with raunchy rebel cops as the heroes doesn’t feel quite so harmless anymore.

I’ve been thinking about Hendra’s self-righteous disdain for Police Academy a lot as of late. When I read Hendra’s book it felt like the work of a man out of time, an arrogant product of the sixties casting stern judgment on the Yuppie comedy of Lorne Michaels and sell-outs like Police Academy. These days he seems ahead of the curve in his fierce convictions that the mass media images we consume, particularly as children, have a deep, unexplored and sometimes deeply unfortunate effect on how we see the world as adults. 

The original, wildly and unfortunately influential Police Academy was a raunchy, R-rated comedy full of sex and profanity and cheap transgression but the franchise was re-tooled for a family audience with subsequent entries that were either PG-13 or PG and an animated series and toy line specifically designed to infect the minds of children with pro-cop propaganda. 

I thought about Hendra’s words again when I saw longtime Monk writer Tom Scharpling tweet over a series of posts, “If you - as I have - worked on a TV show or movie in which police are portrayed as lovable goofballs you have contributed to the larger acceptance that cops are the implicitly the good guys. Most shows don’t portray the brutal shit - much less the racism - that goes on daily. I worked on MONK, that's what we did. Goofy good guy cops for eight seasons. Not saying you should be necessarily be ashamed of your work, it's comedy/entertainment, I get it. But we need to be mindful of the implications of this attitude going forward. We also need to PAY UP. If you made your living portraying cops as harmless heroes, consider giving $$ to support what is right and just, to contribute to actual change.” 

Monk was created by Scharpling’s friend and former WFMIU colleague Andy Breckman, who followed up his long-running depiction of a good, quirky detective with more than his share of eccentricities with a short-lived Tony Danza/Josh Groban vehicle literally called The Good Cop. I could be mistaken but I believe Danza plays the titular good cop. 

Breckman also wrote material for Al Franken’s 2003 USO tour and in 1995 wrote the glibly clever screenplay for Sgt. Bilko. Just as Monk depicted law enforcement as the province of what Scharpling describes as “lovable goofballs”, Sgt Bilko depicts a military more interested in partying, having fun and lighthearted, moderately ribald shenanigans than in executing our country’s colonialist agenda.

The zany funsters of Sgt. Bilko’s Army are only slightly less interested in rocking and rolling all night and partying every day than their contemporaries in the KISS Army. Sgt. Bilko is rooted in the breezy fantasy that despite how it might look from the outside, life inside the army can be fun, fun, fun. 

For the title character, every night is casino night and every day is a day off. Steve Martin plays Sgt. Bilko as a good-natured con man who has transformed life in the motor pool at Fort Baxter into a never-ending grift. The endlessly tolerated Bilko presides merrily over a sort of shadow Army devoted to gambling, get-rich-quick schemes and avoiding honest labor at any cost. 

In a detail that has both aged terribly and says far more than it should about the film and its title rapscallion, Bilko keeps a framed, autographed and personalized photograph of what we can only assume is his hero—a sketchy real estate huckster who was lucratively selling morons fantasies of endless upwards mobility and unimaginable wealth even before he was elected our forty-fifth president. 

Bilko’s one goal in life is to make an obscene amount of money the dishonest way, without working for it or contributing anything of value to society. So of course his role model would be Donald Trump, who has served as a ghostly, malignant presence in the last two movies I’ve seen and written about—Zandalee and Sgt Bilko—just as he is a malignant presence in contemporary life. 

Bilko’s commanding officer John T. Hall (a genially doddering Dan Aykroyd) is too oblivious to notice that his underling is running a small-scale criminal operation under his nose and Bilko’s men are having entirely too much fun to blow the whistle on the Van Wilder of the American military. 

Sgt. Bilko is initially perversely devoid of conflict and stakes. Before making his big-screen debut with 1986’s Clue, arguably the most beloved ever made if the internet is any indication, Sgt. Bilko director Jonathan Lynn sharpened his comic chops as the co-creator of beloved British sitcoms Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister and Sgt. Bilko honors its inspiration a little too directly by looking and feeling very much like a big-screen sitcom. 

As big screen sitcoms go, Sgt. Bilko has a lot going for it. Breckman’s script filled is full of snappy banter and crackling one-liners and wisecracks. Old pro Lynn maintains an energetic pace and breezy tone and Steve Martin can play this kind of charming huckster role in his sleep. 

Sgt. Bilko breezes about pleasantly until the arrival at Fort Baxter of Phil Hartman as antagonist Maj. Colin Thorn. Years earlier Bilko nearly destroyed Thorn’s life and career when Thorn ended up taking the fall for a Bilko-rigged boxing match in which both fighters took a fall simultaneously, leaving Thorn holding the bag, literally and figuratively. 

Thorn wants revenge professionally but also personally. So he sets about getting Bilko fired for his financial chicanery while also pursuing his long-suffering girlfriend and frequent fiancé Rita Robbins (Glenn Headly). Headly is too good for this movie just like her character is too good for Bilko, who continually leaves her stranded at the altar for reasons that run the gamut from forgetting the time and date of his wedding to being otherwise occupied. In the kind of bright zinger that distinguishes Breckman’s script at its best, Bilko’s fiancé jokes that she’s the only woman in torn who has a wedding dress that’s falling apart from wear. 

The perfectly typecast Headly is daffy and adorable as a good girl who just can’t quit a bad little boy of a white-haired middle aged man and is at least flattered by Thorn’s romantic interest. Hartman and Headly are wonderful together, like when they’re having a movie date and Thorn, in a burlesque of 1950s macho chivalry assures Rita, “If any of this is frightening, just hold onto me” and she deadpans of the pre-show action onscreen, “They’re dancing Raisinets” or when Thorn tries to take advantage of his rival’s reluctance to seal the deal by finally marrying his girlfriend by presenting Rita with a ring box, then proudly purring that inside it is nothing less than “2 karats of cubic zirconia.”

Hartman’s wonderful performance gives a featherweight lark a long-overdue element of spine and substance, not to mention much-needed conflict. Sgt. Bilko finds Martin enjoyably on auto-pilot, delivering a fast and funny performance as a slickster who is all superficial charm but Hartman gives so much more than the role or the film requires. 

Cast someone like Christopher McDonald in the role, and Thorn is a nothing part, just another apoplectic authority figure perpetually aghast at our madcap hero’s lovable antics. But the third-billed Hartman turns him into a flesh and blood person, a more multi-dimensional figure than the title character. 

There’s a quietly hypnotic core of genuine, deeply merited rage at the center of Hartman’s performance. He has every right in the world to not just dislike Bilko but to want to destroy him. Hartman’s weirdly sympathetic antagonist is calculating and cunning in his machinations but this is Sgt. Bilko’s movie and Sgt. Bilko’s world so nobody is going to get the best of him. 

There’s never any question that Bilko will get away with it. A man who gets away with everything is obviously going to get away with anything. The pleasure lies in seeing how he gets away with it but Sgt. Bilko is never weaker than when when it bothers with a plot it clearly could not care less about. 

For all of its slick, facile appeal Sgt. Bilko is full of weird missed opportunities, like the perplexing casting of a post-Saturday Night Live, pre-Bring the Pain Chris Rock bizarrely and unsuccessfully against type as a numbers-cruncher dispatched to catch Bilko in the act of criminal financial malfeasance. Rock has very little screen time and even less to do. He appears last in the opening credits pretty much because he has the worst, smallest role in the cast, not as a sign of distinction. Sgt. Bilko’s supporting cast is full of colorful characters who are nowhere near as colorful or memorable as they should be, with the prominent exception of the always-great Austin Pendleton as the dyspeptic inventor of a hovertank that figures prominently in the movie’s underwhelming third act. 

Sgt Bilko ends with the sarcastic epilogue, ”The filmmakers gratefully acknowledge the total lack of co-operation from the United States Army.” That may be the case but it gives the filmmakers, and Sgt. Bilko, credit for a level of subversiveness the movie simply does not possess. 

Like Stripes, Sgt. Bilko is a toothless non-satire about seemingly the biggest, juiciest subject for satire imaginable: the military-industrial complex. Sgt. Bilko is entertaining and doesn’t make you think in the slightest, which, depending on how you look at it, is either a terrible fault or yet another of its lightweight strengths. 

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