https://dejareviewer.com/2019/08/20/sgt-bilko-is-an-underrated-comedy/
Jonathan Lynn doesn’t seem to get much respect as a director. And yet he directed several excellent films, including Clue, My Cousin Vinny, and Sgt. Bilko (1996). Yes, I lump that last film in with those earlier ones because I think it’s a superb comedy. Steve Martin is at the top of his game as a comedian, being effortlessly charming and funny. Plus, it has Phil Hartman as its main villain. You can’t go wrong with that kind of pairing.
To put it mildly, Sgt. Bilko is an underrated comedy. I remember when it first came out, I was surprised that it got savaged by critics. I thought it was genuinely hilarious, and as proof I offer one of the funniest scenes in the movie. This is a flashback where Bilko is explaining an old scheme he cooked up that accidentally got his superior officer in a lot of trouble. If you haven’t seen this before, you’re in for a treat.
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Everything from Bilko’s sardonic narration to the fancy footwork of the two boxers combines to make this scene a comedic knockout. Sgt. Bilko is one of those films where, even if you’re not laughing hysterically throughout, you’re always smiling and having a good time with the characters, much like Clue. You want to see them succeed, despite the fact that they’re a bunch of scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells. That’s all I’ve got to say about Sgt. Bilko. I recommend you seek it out because there’s no reason a movie this good should go unnoticed.
This Looks Mediocre! Sgt. Bilko (1995) (https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2020/6/23/this-looks-mediocre-sgt-bilko-1995)
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.
or 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.