Hail Caesar

Torn between launching his punk-grunge band with Russian emigre Vlad (Illa Volokin) and long-suffering Annie (Leslie Dannon) or winning the hand of a spoiled heiress named Buffer (Bobbie Phillips), Julius Caesar Mac Gruder (Anthony Michael Hall) flunks out of college and follows his dreams. He naively accepts a wager from Buffer's doting dad, Mr. Bidwell (Nicholas Pryor), a pencil eraser magnate: Julius has six months to earn $100,000 if he wants to win the hand of his WASP princess. What Julius doesn't know is that Bidwell and his Uriah Heep-like assistant Larry Remora (Kane Picoy) are simultaneously setting him up to fail in business and protect their right-wing conspiracy plans, code-named Big Pink. Julius's supervisor, Mr. Dewitt (Frank Gorshin), learns the truth about Big Pink, so Larry murders him and promotes Julius from his minimum wage position. Unable to find record company backers for his band, Julius plunges into his day job to raise some cash. Annie accuses him of abandoning the band, but computer genius Vlad helps Julius investigate the Big Pink mystery (ultra-conservative Bidwell plans to upset a peace conference with his line of exploding rubber erasers). Julius survives a bomb blast set by Larry to level the factory, and Larry accuses him of corporate subversion. Even though he loses the Buffer wager, Julius has the satisfaction of seeing Bidwell and Larry brought to justice. And in a surprising and fortuitous stroke of luck, Julius learns that a Roman antiquarian has certified that a Venus statue on his property is a rare sculpture worth millions. Julius returns to his music and sets his cap for true-blue Annie, abandoning the shallow and flighty Buffer.

The dismal HAIL CAESAR is brightened by its cinematography, which features the kind of cartoonish color saturation upon which escapist comedy thrives. Visual sunniness aside, HAIL CAESAR is a foolish, achingly cute, self-indulgent morass that is a virtual lesson in how not to make a comedy.

Loosely based on a Mark Twain short story that has been the basis of many films, the movie's ridiculous plot is fatally undermined by an intrusive song score and heavy-handed direction. Not only is the anti-big business satire ineffective, but Hall's two romantic interests are both so unpleasantly written and acted that the film's romantic underpinnings rot away. Hall himself is overbearing enough to make Yahoo Serious seem like Buster Keaton. Samuel L. Jackson, a fine actor who deserves better, makes a sorry spectacle of himself, and HAIL CAESAR includes wretched cameos by Hall's former Brat Pack cronies Judd Nelson and Robert Downey Jr., whose semi-improvised scenes represent the nadir of his checkered career. (Profanity, violence.) leave a comment