Same writer, producer, and director. Same two leads and a cameo by the third. Same whimsy and ipsative jokes. It no longer works.
The first impression a viewer gets is that the photography is too GOOD. It's in nice, crisp black and white, whereas it ought to be in fuzzy 1940s gray. And the boys now ride around in boxy 1960s cars and fly on 707s and walk through modern airport lobbies. They should be sitting on onagers and polar bears. Everybody knows that.
The story should put the fellows in some exotic locale. Hong Kong would do nicely. But the sets should be cheap and ludicrously shoddy, not at all realistic, as they are here. This story is all wrong. It puts them in space suits and sends them to a distant planet after escaping the clutches of a James-Bondian gang called The Third Echelon. It looks to the future instead of looking to the colonial past as their previous Road pictures did. Too much time is spent with the queerly costumed villains and too little with Hope and Crosby.
And the gags are worn out; they come more slowly and they're sillier. One of the gags, an automatic feeding machine gone berserk, is lifted from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." When the most amusing scene is handed over to Peter Sellers as an Indian neurologist, you know there's trouble somewhere. Sellers toots randomly on a wooden flute and a cobra rises out of a basket. Hope shrinks back. Sellers tells him not to worry. If he gives you a nip, you just cut an X on the bite, suck out the poison, and spit it out. "But what if he bites me someplace I can't reach?" Sellers takes a step forward, pauses, and says earnestly, "That's when you find out who your true friends are." This kind of nihilistic nonsense is a young person's game, or middle-aged anyway. Hope and Crosby are past their 1940s prime and it shows in their appearance and their pacing. Not to blame them. It is God's will that we change with age. But there are times that almost rival those in Laurel and Hardy's last team effort, "Utopia," when pathos trumps amusement.
Several cameos -- not just Sellers, but David Niven, Sinatra and Martin, and Jerry Colonna. They don't save the picture. Everyone seems to be working too hard and, overall, it shouldn't have happened.
The first impression a viewer gets is that the photography is too GOOD. It's in nice, crisp black and white, whereas it ought to be in fuzzy 1940s gray. And the boys now ride around in boxy 1960s cars and fly on 707s and walk through modern airport lobbies. They should be sitting on onagers and polar bears. Everybody knows that.
The story should put the fellows in some exotic locale. Hong Kong would do nicely. But the sets should be cheap and ludicrously shoddy, not at all realistic, as they are here. This story is all wrong. It puts them in space suits and sends them to a distant planet after escaping the clutches of a James-Bondian gang called The Third Echelon. It looks to the future instead of looking to the colonial past as their previous Road pictures did. Too much time is spent with the queerly costumed villains and too little with Hope and Crosby.
And the gags are worn out; they come more slowly and they're sillier. One of the gags, an automatic feeding machine gone berserk, is lifted from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." When the most amusing scene is handed over to Peter Sellers as an Indian neurologist, you know there's trouble somewhere. Sellers toots randomly on a wooden flute and a cobra rises out of a basket. Hope shrinks back. Sellers tells him not to worry. If he gives you a nip, you just cut an X on the bite, suck out the poison, and spit it out. "But what if he bites me someplace I can't reach?" Sellers takes a step forward, pauses, and says earnestly, "That's when you find out who your true friends are." This kind of nihilistic nonsense is a young person's game, or middle-aged anyway. Hope and Crosby are past their 1940s prime and it shows in their appearance and their pacing. Not to blame them. It is God's will that we change with age. But there are times that almost rival those in Laurel and Hardy's last team effort, "Utopia," when pathos trumps amusement.
Several cameos -- not just Sellers, but David Niven, Sinatra and Martin, and Jerry Colonna. They don't save the picture. Everyone seems to be working too hard and, overall, it shouldn't have happened.