My World of Flops McHale's Folly Case File #176 Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #187 McHale's Navy (1998)

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This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

When consummate supporting player Tom Arnold stole True Lies from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis and the deeply xenophobic, misogynistic, incredibly problematic James Cameron blockbuster grossed nearly four hundred million dollars at the box office, its success deluded Hollywood into thinking that if audiences unexpectedly liked Arnold as a sassy sidekick then they would love him as a leading man. 

This bizarre misconception led to 1996’s Big Bully, which cost fifteen million dollars and grossed a meager two mil. That somehow did not keep studio executives from once again casting him in a lead role in Carpool, which came out the same year and similarly stiffed at the box-office, grossing a little over three million dollars on a seventeen million dollar budget. 

The stupidity continued with 1996’s The Stupids, which somehow did even worse than its predecessors, grossing two and a half million dollars, roughly one tenth of its twenty-five million dollar budget. 

Looking back, Tom Arnold’s career as a cinematic leading man in theatrically released, medium-budget studio films looks less like a bad bet on behalf of studios and producers and more like an elaborate tax dodge/financial swindle, not unlike in The Producers or Uwe Boll’s early career. 

Studios were violently disabused of their psychotic, inexplicable delusion that what audiences were hungering for was more Tom Arnold vehicles when 1997’s McHale’s Navy flopped even harder than all of the Tom Arnold movies before it, eking out a pathetic four and a half million dollar box-office take on a forty-two million dollar budget. 

Watching McHale’s Navy turned me into a goddamn studio bean-counter. Every time something blew up all I could think about was the terrible waste and expense and how the filmmakers must have known that their forty two million dollar Tom Arnold movie stood absolutely no chance of ever turning a profit. 

I like Tom Arnold. I think he’s funny. I think he’s enormously likable. I think he’s a terrific character actor who has done wonderful work in movies like Touch and Happy Endings. I brighten up a little when I see his name in opening credits. I interviewed him for the A.V Club’s Random Roles feature and found him to be a delight, candid and self-deprecating with all kinds of funny stories and amusing anecdotes. 

Yet I will be the first to concede that Tom Arnold is not a movie star. He’s not a lead. Creatively and commercially he cannot carry a movie.

I did not see McHale’s Navy when it came out because it looked exactly like Sgt. Bilko but worse and the 1995 Steve Martin vehicle didn’t look particularly good to begin with. 

Now that I have seen McHale’s Navy and Sgt. Bilko I can say that my hunch was one hundred percent correct. Terrific turns by Steve Martin and Phil Hartman elevate Sgt. Bilko to the level of affable mediocrity whereas McHale’s Navy desperately wishes it could be average. Instead mediocrity is poignantly out of its reach. 

McHale’s Navy does just about everything wrong, beginning with the casting of Arnold as Lt. Commander Quinton McHale, Jr., a whip-smart, quick-witted hustler who has been hanging around an island near Cuba, running various scams and serving as a white savior/benefactor to all of the grateful locals since retiring from the Navy. 

It’s a role that fatally misunderstands the nature of Arnold’s appeal. Arnold is an affable goober, a likable oaf. He’s not Bill Murray or Steve Martin. McHale’s Navy miscasts him as the fastest, smartest, hippest guy in the room as well as an unassuming Saint who coaches children’s baseball and looks after a dead colleague’s family.

There is at least one good movie here

When a movie like McHale’s Navy contains famous faces and big names like Tim Curry, Bruce Campbell, David Allan Grier, Ernest Borgnine reprising his role from the 1960s McHale’s Navy television show, Debra Messing, French Stewart, James Hong and Tommy Chong, then the decision to make it a Tom Arnold movie feels like a choice at once arbitrary and deeply wrong. 

As McHale’s Navy opens, its titular wisenheimer is happily retired from military life and living on a little island all his own outside a Naval base not far from Cuba. McHale’s life of schemes and scams is rudely interrupted by the re-emergence of his most hated enemy, Maj. Vladakov (Tim Curry), a notorious terrorist, and oily and antagonistic officer Capt. Wallace B. Binghampton (Dean Stockwell) setting up shop at the base. 

Vladakov is introduced as the second best terrorist in the world, a designation that gives him an insecurity complex treated by a psychiatrist whose family he has kidnapped. The idea of a ruthless criminal neurotic about only being considered second best is borderline chuckle-inducing when first introduced. By the twentieth time someone references Vladakov’s second-place status, however, it’s closer to rage-inducing. 

There are so few jokes and ideas in McHale’s Navy’s overstuffed and under-funny screenplay, however, that it makes sense that it’d feel the need to beat its one halfway inspired conceit to death. 

When Curry rolls his eyes upon constantly being reminded that he’s not the best it quickly comes to feel like he’s annoyed with the dire film he’s stuck in rather than irritated with his runner-up position in the top terrorist competition. 

As with Arnold, I perk up when I see Dean Stockwell is in a movie. He is one of the all-time greats so when I learned he was in the movie I wondered what wonders this master thespian, this towering legend of the silver screen, had in store for us. That excitement died a quick, decisive death when the great character actor opened his mouth the first time and the cartoon nasal whine of a stereotypical nerd comes out. 

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Stockwell’s career-worst turn feels like a feature-length tribute to Jaleel White’s iconic interpretation of the role of Steve Urkel on Family Matters minus the charm and big dick energy. 

Did I do that?

Poor Bruce Campbell is wasted in the tiny, thankless role of the gang’s resident lady’s man Virgil. In his memoir If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor Campbell writes he and the rest of the cast were given little direction beyond “follow Tom Arnold around.” 

For a talent show sequence he and French Stewart worked up a whole vaudevillian routine employing Naval and nautical turns, only to see their work wasted when they appeared in the distant background for a scene whose focus is Tom Arnold and Debra Messing’s characters having a joke-free exchange that does nothing but move a plot that’s impossible to care about forward. 

When given a choice between national treasure Bruce Campbell and French Stewart doing an Abbott & Costello routine or Tom Arnold and Debra Messing delivering exposition, the filmmakers unwisely chose to relegate Campbell and Stewart to the distant background. 

McHale’s Navy makes a lot of bewildering choices, like lasting an interminable 108 minutes when it has no right whatsoever to last beyond the bare minimum of eighty minutes or so.

The screenplay plays a lot of the action and drama surprisingly straight, overloading a feeble, paper-thin screenplay with unnecessarily convoluted backstories involving McHale’s dramatic history with Maj. Vladakov and islanders who see him as a benevolent savior figure. 

Even Ernest Borgnine, McHale himself, seems lost in a movie bizarrely devoid of comedy yet surprisingly full of stilted drama, lethargic action and tone-deaf political commentary involving Fidel Castro and his hold on the Cuban people. 

McHale’s Navy makes Sgt. Bilko look like Das Boot by way of Dr. Strangelove by comparison. It officially and very expensively ended Tom Arnold’s career as a cinematic leading man. 

Then again, Arnold’s career as a name-above-the-title movie star never should have even began, and I write that as a fan. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure 

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