Cheap Deal of the Century (Video) (Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver) (William Friedkin) Price

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Customer Reviews of Deal of the Century

hey, it was funny back then and it's still funny now
I have read the reviews of some others, and yeah, it was a relatively low budget movie. And this was during Chevy Chase' hayday of movies that had genius, but unrealized; much like modern problems. It's something about his quiet wit, like his Ty Cobb character in Caddyshack. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic. But didn't you laugh when he was demonstrating the machine gun with the bottle opener to the guerilla fighters? Wasn't it funny when he held up the mugger when he was being held up? Wasn't it funny when he got shot in the foot AGAIN?! Wasn't it funny when the Luck-up team was more concerned about the air-conditioner over the drone?!

"What's a place like this doing around a girl like you?"

"Do you mind, I just lost my husband"
"Well, we have a few minutes, we could look for him."

"I like your flame job...I'm just gonna give it a little touch up!"

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Uninspired satire on the military-industrial complex
This flick satirizes the dreaded military-industrial complex, but it resembles the acquisitions process more than it realizes. Chevy Chase plays a low-level arms contractor, selling cheap (booby-trapped urinals) and used weapons to foreigners who should be spending more time and money on their own impoverished and illiterate citizens. On a selling trip to a south American dictatorship (where chickens strut thruought the presidential palace), he meets a desperate and suicidal corporate rep for a larger and more serious contractor - "Lock-Up", with a more serious product, the Buzzard pilot-less aircraft. Not simply a drone, the Buzzard completely replaces all piloted warplanes - in concept. When the rep meets his end, Chase steps in and sells the Buzzard (along with his own sub-machinegun cameras) to the dictator. Three things complicate Chase on his return. His longtime partner, an ex-jet jock played by Gregory Hines, has found religion, complicating his eagerness to sell weapons of mass destruction door-to-door. Chase also runs afoul of Sigourney Weaver, the Lock-Up rep's grieving widow. She nearly kills him trying to steal back the signed contract for the Buzzard. But the Buzzard itself is the biggest snag. After a disastrous public debut, all of Lock-Up's customers cancel their contracts, and it's up to Chevy Chase to snag the dictator's contract again. No longer selling used flamethrowers, Chase is exposed to the outright corruption of the global arms industry in its heyday (Reagan's first term; extensive conventional conflicts using sophisticated weapons in the Falklands and the Mideast), receiving advice and support from all sides desirous of preserving the concept of stable conventional warfare through the 21st century.

So, why does this flick die? Military weapons are designed to solve a problem like "how do we shoot down an incoming missile?" or, in this case "how do we shoot down the dreaded conspiracy of militant generals, greedy defense contractors, corrupt third world dictators, lobbyists and our own politicians"? In each case, we're told that the answer is simple, yet it soon proves difficult, complex, expensive and, ultimately, doesn't even work. How could you misfire against a target as ripe as the military-industrial complex? Though this is a comedy, nobody looks or sounds remotely funny. At times, the script becomes outright nasty (Weaver's character is forced to "service" the dictator as the screen focuses on a montage of military hardware; the scene ends when the "client" proves he is NOT master of his domain). "Deal" could have played it as a straight parody (like MASH) but the script is too heavy-handed to let the defense industry get off lightly - the flick climaxes at an arms-industry expo played over the top with outrageous dance numbers. Bereft of much plot, the script suddenly realizes it needs a more concrete villain than the MIC and turns to Lock-Up's CEO for help. A stone-faced corporate type, the expo positively unhinges him. "We're state of the art" he says in a wide-eyed frenzy not unlike Jimmy Cagney in "White Heat" ("Top of the World"), just so the film can end on a happy note with his downfall. There's got to be a better way to satirize the defense-acquisitions process, just like there's got to be a better way to take on Saddam Hussein, it's just that nobody has figured out how.

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...Of course, that's just my opinion.