The thorny issue of veterans receiving substandard treatment in tight-budgeted, bureaucracy-plagued Veterans Administration hospitals receives little real insight in ARTICLE 99, a routine effort that borrows its freeswinging comic style from M*A*S*H but timidly pulls most of its punches.
Dr. Peter Morgan (Keifer Sutherland) is an up-and-coming heart surgeon who signs on at a VA hospital for his internship. There he encounters a nightmarish morass of red tape in trying to treat his patients and "creeping cutbacks" in budgets that have led to the title's fictitious catch-22 rule,
promising treatment to all veterans but immediately withdrawing it in the absence of hard evidence directly connecting their maladies to military service. To get around this rule, doctors admit patients for authorized service-connected treatments they don't need and then attempt to give them the
unauthorized treatment they do need on the sly. Morgan forms a friendship with one such patient (they're dubbed "gomers" by the hospital staff), a dying World War II veteran named Sam Abrams (Eli Wallach). Sam's dilemma moves Morgan to endanger his career by joining a group of renegade doctors,
led by Dr. Richard Sturgess (Ray Liotta), who steal supplies and equipment at night from a well-funded research lab in the hospital's basement to perform their unauthorized operations.
Unfortunately, the naive Morgan is duped by the hospital's dogmatic administrator, Dr. Henry Dreyfoos (John Mahoney), into setting up Sturgess's group to be secretly videotaped during one of their midnight raids. Dreyfoos uses the tape to force Sturgess to take a voluntary suspension and face
charges in return for not exposing his co-conspirators (Forest Whitaker and John C. McGinley). Morgan solves this problem by walking off with the tape and giving it to Sturgess, who returns to the hospital in triumph to perform a heart bypass on one of his own gomers, a Korean War vet (Troy
Evans). Meanwhile a group of dissident veterans, led by a double amputee (Keith David) and a stress syndrome victim (Leo Burmester), blockade the hospital, forcing the exposure of Mahoney's villainy to the VA inspector general (Noble Willingham), who promises to oust Mahoney and institute reforms
to end the blockade.
ARTICLE 99 gets off to a strong start, only to get weaker and more predictable as it goes along. Helmer Howard Deutch (PRETTY IN PINK, SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL) sets the right tone of grey despair outside and farcical life-and-death chaos inside the beleaguered hospital. From his apprenticeship with
John Hughes he also evidently learned how to move an ensemble cast crisply through its paces. Sutherland is for once perfectly cast as a smarmy careerist at first interested in nothing more than putting in his time and keeping his pampered ass covered. Liotta is also typically strong as the
hospital's chief renegade. The talented supporting cast contributes strongly, especially Whitaker, McGinley, David (all "veterans" of Oliver Stone's acclaimed PLATOON) and Mahoney. The largely peripheral females are led by the talented Kathy Baker, Julie Bovasso, Lea Thompson and Michelle Little.
But even the best performances are diluted by Ron Cutler's routine screenplay which begins veering away from complexity and originality early on. The chief antagonists are flat and uninteresting. Despite having a fling with Baker, Liotta is presented as a kind of Mother Teresa in hospital whites,
while Mahoney is so doggedly devoted to ensuring that nobody ever gets treated in his hospital that one is left wondering how he attained his position in the first place. The only character who changes, Sutherland's, only gets more boring as the film goes on. From the moment he first locks eyes
with Thompson, one of Liotta's devoted protectors, we know his days as a selfish yuppie won't last to the next reel change. The veterans' blockade of the hospital functions more to add a dash of spectacle to the climax than to serve any dramatic purpose. But most disappointing of all is how the
film pulls back from its promised indictment of the VA system. Never examined is the source of the "creeping cutbacks" that lead Mahoney to his fanatical penny-pinching. As a result, never confronted is the inspector general, who appears instead as the film's improbable deus ex machina. Its
overall failure of nerve makes ARTICLE 99 a typically lame Hollywood pseudo-political drama whose bark is worse than its bite. (Profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment
