CaddyShack

Directed by Harold Ramis, CaddyShack follows several characters, including Michael O’Keefe’s Danny Noonan, Ted Knight’s Elihu Smails, and Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler, as they experience a series of wacky happenings within an exclusive country club. Filmmaker Ramis, armed with his and Brian Doyle-Murray and Douglas Kenney’s screenplay, delivers an erratic, hit-and-miss comedy that is, to an increasingly distressing extent, more miss than hit, as the movie progresses through a slapdash narrative that contains exceedingly little in the way of forward momentum – with the emphasis, for the most part, placed on individual sequences of a decidedly off-the-wall nature. (It would be easy enough to forgive the film’s haphazard structure had more of this actually been funny, ultimately.) There’s little doubt, then, that CaddyShack‘s tolerable vibe is due almost entirely to the charming efforts of its various performers, as the cast’s uniformly loose, appealing work goes a long way towards periodically smoothing over the myriad of bumps and lulls within the 98 minute running time (to a degree, anyway) – although, by the time the fairly anticlimactic final competition rolls around, the picture has cemented its place as a disappointing misfire that never quite becomes as entertaining (or hilarious) as one might’ve hoped.

** out of ****