At 146 minutes, Steven Spielberg’s epic misfire is too long to qualify as a fascinating train wreck; even its spectacular badness grows wearying. As it speculates on the riotous paranoia that strikes Los Angeles in the days after Pearl Harbor, 1941 throws gobs of money and special effects at the screen and strains for laughs in just about every wrong way: the slapstick is laboriously telegraphed; the humor is random but never delightfully absurd; the jokes are often distasteful, but never purposefully so (which could have made them funny). There may indeed by a loony war satire at work here – nearly every military man is a bumbling idiot – but long before that point 1941 becomes a satire of itself. John Belushi’s walking chaos makes a nice match with the material, but otherwise this features a long list of actors falling flat on their faces: Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, Slim Pickens, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates, Robert Stack, Nancy Allen, Lorraine Gray, Treat Williams, John Candy and more.
