Big-name stars spark most of the interest in this silly but amiable family film.
Three misfit high school boys, Slug (Ryan Thomas Johnson), Mickey (Joshua Schaefer), and Frank (Michael Bower), have their hideout in a burned-out restaurant. After explosives fanatic Slug is suspended from school by the school principal, Mr. Wareman (Joe Piscopo), the boys find a "prototype
nuclear device" abandoned in the restaurant by members of a terrorist group called the "New American Resistance." The lads, as a prank, proclaim themelves "Captain Nuke and the Bomber Boys" and blackmail Wareman and his superiors into closing all LA public schools. The ambitious trio then aims
higher, coercing the U.S. president (Rod Steiger) and advisor Birney (Peter Vogt) into supporting the pending "Children's Rights Bill."
Meanwhile, the Pizza King's former owners, lowlifes Joey Franelli (Joe Mantegna) and his girlfriend Brenda (Joanna Pacula) find the bomb and blackmail the city for $2 million. Alerted to this potentially lethal turn of events by Frank's mother (Kate Mulgrew), the boys decide to stop joking around
and aid bumbling FBI agent Jeff Snyder (Martin Sheen), but are captured by Franelli and Brenda while attempting to steal back the bomb. After a series of chases, Slug discovers the bomb in a warehouse filled with fireworks. He discovers that the original terrorists had set the bomb to detonate via
a timer device, and when Snyder is unable to disarm it, Slug steps in to save the day.
Franelli and Brenda are arrested, but the three boys are not, due to the president's fear of scandal. They are instantly lionized back at school when the news breaks, and Slug decides they might just be able to build a bomb of their own.
Fancifully written but routinely directed by Charles Gale, CAPTAIN NUKE is, if not much else, politically correct to the core: when the lads realize that the "Children's Rights Bill" they've forced the president into signing mostly only provides money for nationwide day-care centers, they're
disappointed, but one of them quickly pipes up, "Well, at least it will help a lot of poor people." Gale's satirical pokes at the likes of FBI men, politicians, and domestic terrorism groups--although the film was released a tad too soon after the Oklahoma bombing perhaps for the latter, even in
the lightweight family-film genre--are quite gentle and never very inventive or funny, ditto the likes of stars Mantegna and Pacula broadly "playing dumb."
Despite his reputation for scenery-chewing, veteran Rod Steiger is almost reticent as the president; not so Martin Sheen, who throughout the film is unable to successfully sit down without missing his chair and sprawling. Perhaps better off, both Piscopo and Mulgrew are given very little to do
here. The movie was one of the first efforts of B-movie great Roger Corman to breach the direct-to-video family market--Corman has astutely always gone where there's money to be made--and almost as an homage, there's a lengthy sequence of chase-ending car crashes set in a drive-in theater, where
most of Corman's productions, from the 1950s on, were aimed and watched.(Violence, adult situations.) leave a comment
