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Catch-22War is hellishly hilarious in this adaptation of Joseph Heller's satirical novel 'Catch-22'. It may not match the linguistic brilliance of the book, but director Mike Nichols' approach to Heller's grandstanding literary tour de force about a group of US Air Force pilots in the Mediterranean during the Second World War features a host of entertaining performances from its big name supporting cast, and offers a poignant take on the absurdity of war.
Alan Arkin stars as Captain Yossarian, a paranoid bombardier convinced that everyone is out to kill him. He's right, of course, but it's the people supposedly on his side who prove more dangerous than the enemy soldiers manning the anti-aircraft guns below him. Surrounded by representatives of a military - and, indeed, a world - that's gone completely cuckoo, Yossarian may well be the only sane man left. Which, of course, is why no one will let him leave the battle: "Let me see if I've got this straight: in order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy any more and I have to keep flying."
As in the novel, which ushered the phrase 'Catch-22' into the English language, there's no escape from the torturously circular logic that fuels the war effort. Duty, democracy and death mean nothing to the film's characters who are so detached from the reality of their situation and the true horror of war that they can no longer see the insanity around them. More demented than Robert Altman's equally absurd M*A*S*H (which was released the same year), Catch-22 lurches from one comic set-piece to the next, offering us nobody other than the petrified and increasingly cracked Yossarian to identify with.
Indeed, everyone here is completely nuts, from Major Major (Newhart), who'll only see people in his office when he's not there, to the entrepreneurial Milo Minderbinder (Voight) who, in a telling comment on the hidden economic forces driving the conflict, sees the war as nothing more than a business opportunity to sell chocolate covered cotton.
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