By Richard Winters
My Rating: 3 out of 10
4-Word Review: Shenanigans at summer camp.
Tripper (Bill Murray) has been assigned to lead a new group of counselors-in-training while simultaneously pulling pranks on camp director Morty (Harvey Atkin). He also takes shy camper Rudy (Chris Makepeace) under his wings and giving the kid some confidence, so that he can play in sports and feel that he has a chance to win. Tripper also gets involved in the annual Olympiad between his camp, Camp North Star, and their rival Camp Mohawk, which sits across the lake from theirs. Camp Mohawk has won the title the past 12 years, but this year Tripper thinks things will be different mainly because he’s trained Rudy on how to be a cross-country runner due to their early morning jogs together and assigns him, much to the disagreement of the other campers, to run against Mohawk’s top runner in the crucial final race.
This was the fourth film directed by Ivan Reitman and while he went on to direct a lot of big hits I felt here he was still learning the craft and it would’ve been a better movie had someone with more experience been at the helm. Originally it was intended for John Landis to direct, but he was too busy working on The Blues Brothers, so Reitman reluctantly took the reins, but the pacing and tone is all off. To some degree it seems to want to be an Animal House wanna-be filled with off-color humor and slapstick, but at other points it tries for sentimental drama. Nowhere is this more evident than it’s eclectic choice of music featuring bouncy tune by Rick Dees and then turning around and having a sappy song by Maureen McGovern that seems out of place for a film that most of the time dwells in low brow humor.
Story-wise it’s incredibly vapid and seems to almost be plotless most of the way. The main crux of the script is apparently centered around Rudy and Tripper’s attempts to help him find some confidence in himself, but even these moments come-off as trite and thrown-in at haphazard intervals. In-between we get treated to a lot of silly hijinks and benign characterizations that mostly fall flat. There’s a lot of potential story threads that the could’ve been funny, but the movie fails to follow through on.
There’s a segment where the parent’s come to visit for a day, but this lasts for a minute and then it’s over. I also wanted to see the reluctant Rudy give out the morning messages of the day via an intercom set-up that had been traditionally done by Tripper. Since Tripper was going to be out he handed over the duties to Rudy who seemed nervous about the responsibility, so it would’ve been interesting to watching how he ended up approaching it and how the other campers responded, but instead we aren’t shown any of it. The same goes for a little boy who brings a frog with him that doesn’t ever move because he’s ‘tired’ yet we never get any follow-up to this, so why even have the scene, which isn’t funny or interesting anyways, if it has no real point to the plot?
The running gag involving the camp director named Morty who’s constantly referred to as ‘Mickey’ gets overblown and rather dumb. It has him being such a sound sleeper that the other campers, under Tripper’s guidance, move him and his bed, along with his bedside table, out of cabin and into various other parts of the campsite including at one point on a raft on a lake. When he wakes up he then finds himself in a very precarious situation, but it’s hard to believe that someone could sleep that deeply that they would’ve wake-up while they were being moved. Even if that were the case you’d think they’d come-up with some way to prevent it occurring in the future like bolting their door shut, or constructing some sort of booby trap that would catch the pranksters in the act. This could actually make it even funnier as it would be upping the ante each time versus just replaying the same old prank. At the very least you’d expect an ultimate angry confrontation between Morty and Tripper who he knew was behind it, which at one point he threatens to do, as he states ‘we’ll talk about it later’, but we never see the ‘talk’ actually happen, which again makes it seem like the movie really isn’t going anywhere.
Bill Murray, who reportedly wasn’t sure if he wanted to do it due to his SNL obligations at the time, but finally did show up to the shoot on the third day of production, is genuinely quite funny and the only things that saves it from being a dud though it comes close to being one anyways. However, his character does prove to be a bit problematic in the scene where he aggressively tackles an attractive counselor he wants to have sex with, played by Kate Lynch, which would be deemed sexual harassment in this day and age and not the ‘good natured, boys will be boys’ fun that it was considered at the time.
The film though does manage to elicit nostalgic homage to the camping experience, so those that look back to their summer camp days with fond memories may bond to this better. Otherwise I found it highly overrated and genuinely surprised that it did so well at the box office.
My Rating: 3 out of 10
Released: 1 Hour 34 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Ivan Reitman
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Freevee, Pluto, Roku, Tubi, YouTube
Scopophilia 