Caddyshack (1980)
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Caddyshack Movie Review
Caddyshack is a 1980 sports comedy film directed by Harold Ramis and starring Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, Ted Knight and Chevy Chase. It’s a scattershot, but mildly amusing comedy.
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“Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!“
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A young caddie wants to pursue a scholarship at an elite country club so that he can join a college. However, to achieve his goal, he must get in the good books of Judge Smails and ace a tournament. That is the basic premise behind this flick that really is plotless when you think about it. It is also directionless, which is why the director himself does not care for it decades after its release.
This is one of those 80s comedies that are popular and beloved just because of nostalgia. Watching it today, it is rather dated and too scattershot to make a stronger impact. Ramis basically did not direct this movie at all, but rather put all of these famous comedians into one movie and let them all do what they want, resulting in a mish-mash of comedic styles and approaches that never coalesced into a coherent whole.
The movie was at its best when it paired them off, but that happened way too scarcely. The one scene between Chase and Murray was the singular highlight of the picture as they played off each other brilliantly, begging the question in the process why the entire film wasn’t like this one scene.
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But as the film itself separated them, I will also analyze the performers individually. Chevy Chase was terrific in a couple of moments and the movie through him made fun of the snobbery of the rich, but it took almost the majority of the runtime for his character to click unfortunately. Ted Knight himself was only okay and I fail to understand why he is so beloved in this movie by audiences when his character wasn’t all that interesting or memorable.
Rodney Dangerfield also doesn’t appeal to me. I respected that he went all in, delivering a very over-the-top, colorful performance and personality, but too often he was just crude for the sake of being crude. The best part of Caddyshack in my book was easily Bill Murray, who was at some of his funniest in this flick. He was perfectly cast as this sex-crazed, rude and rough-looking gardener that in his antics with the gopher resembled a full-on Looney Tunes character.
And that’s the main issue of Caddyshack – it tries to be a sitcom, but it also is very much full of absurdism, slapstick humor and dialogue-driven comedic scenes, but most of these never led into anything, though some scenes worked, in particular the very funny pool sequence. But none of it was truly hilarious and the movie was technically uninspired with weak cinematography, poorly utilized soundtrack and again mediocre direction.
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Caddyshack is an overrated 80s comedy that is mostly beloved for nostalgia reasons. Individually speaking, most performers delivered with Bill Murray easily stealing the show with his over-the-top personality and amusing Looney Tunes-styled antics with the gopher. The pool scene was also very funny. The flick is amusing and entertaining throughout, but it is so plotless and so directionless that it never led into anything even resembling a coherent storyline. Ramis put all of these different comedians and their diverse comedic styles into one movie that felt muddled and scattershot. It has its charms, but it should have been better directed and more streamlined in its approach.
My Rating – 3.5
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