I’m always a little hesitant to write reviews for supposedly classic movies that I ultimately did not end up liking on a first watch.

I’m reminded of a few months ago when I finally saw The Goonies. Now did I hate, or even actively dislike, The Goonies? No. But I thought it was entirely pedestrian, really. Like a definitive 5 / 10 for me. It feels like The Average Movie to me. So I skipped out on writing about it because I just didn’t want to deal with getting lambasted for not loving it. And I don’t like peddling in negativity, either.

This brings us, of course, to today’s offering: Caddyshack. We’ll get to my full thoughts in a little bit, but as you can guess, I was not nearly as enamored of it as a lot of people are. So why the review this time? Well I guess I had more to say about Caddyshack that I needed to get out of my head. And I don’t imagine catching quite the lashing for this one that I would have for The Goonies, ha!

Caddyshack came out in 1980, so while it’s a 1980’s movie, it feels weird to classify it as such, as it was most likely filmed in ’79. It’s barely an 80’s movie. But it has all the trappings of the decade, so it really does feel like it belongs. Time moved faster back in the day, I suppose.

The story of Caddyshack is that of young Danny Noonan, a seemingly average high schooler between grades and on his summer break. He is trying to figure out his future while he works the days away as a caddy for a local prestigious golf course. His father wants him to get a job in manual labor, but his mother wants him to get into college.

Unfortunately, Danny knows his overburdened family can’t afford to send him to college. And his grades aren’t good enough to get any scholarships. So what’s a kid to do? Well, while at work, he finds out there is a caddy scholarship (…really?) being offered by the country club. Danny sets out to do whatever it takes to win that award and secure himself a future.

And, oh yeah, like 30 other things are going on at this zany club, but we’ll get into all that in a moment…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight are the high points here, and their rivalry is the most entertaining bits of the movie. Every time they interacted, my attention was at its most piqued. In a pretty stacked cast of a movie, I was surprised it was these two that got to me the most, but here we are. They were a blast.

Dangerfield is using the whole movie as his playground. He’s treating the entire set-up as a field for his stand-up comedy. And that really works here as he just prances onto screen and starts riffing at everything and everyone in sight. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they didn’t even bother giving him a script and just let him do whatever he wanted.

As for Knight, he’s a typically great 1980’s cinematic villain. He’s slimy and overreaching. He has wonderful facial reactions, and he is bullying everyone who gets in his way. He throws around his power and wealth and influence to get what he wants, and it’s a sheer delight at the end of the picture when he gets his comeuppance (though, really, he is constantly getting comeuppance from Dangerfield throughout).

Forget the rest of the characters; I would have watched this flick if it was just 90 minutes of Knight and Rodney acting against each other.

+ Speaking of the other characters, going into Caddyshack, I had NO IDEA what it was going to be about, so imagine my surprise when Murray, Dangerfield, and Chase were background players to some kid who was trying to plan for his future. I liked that storyline, and it surprised me because I’d never heard of his character before in my life. This movie has existed for 45 years, and I had no concept of what the plot actually was.

Now, is the story of Danny trying to get a caddy scholarship so he can make it into college and make his family proud that well conceived or acted? Eh, not really. As alluded to in the first Up, I spent most of the time Danny was on screen wanting to go back to Rodney Dangerfield. But it was ballsy of the movie to turn its stars into window dressing for a teenager’s main plot.

– This is really like a 40 minute short film’s worth of plot overstuffed with some pointless, irrelevant side antics to fill out the runtime. There are sex scenes that are wildly gratuitous and go nowhere, Bill Murray taking some guy golfing in the rain, the notorious swimming pool/chocolate bar scene. Honestly, MOST of the movie doesn’t matter. Caddyshack feels more like a loose collection of ideas that Harold Ramis and the writers had than a cohesive movie.

And that’s fine; that can work in a different movie. And it’s not to say it doesn’t work at all here. It just ultimately feels unfocused. Like I mentioned above, perhaps they realized the Danny plot wasn’t really strong enough to carry its own movie, so they just wrote more scenes for Rodney Dangerfield to dance to a Journey song that his golf bag plays. That’s fine, I suppose.

– Caddyshack is fun enough–and it’s never not enjoyable–but it’s also never really laugh-out-loud funny. At most, it got a shoulder pop from me (you know… where you kind of go “Heh” and your shoulders rise quickly for a soft mini-chuckle). I expected this to be a laugh riot as the classic it’s viewed as, and I just thought it was lightly amusing instead. Even the aforementioned Ted Knight and Rodney Dangerfield scenes didn’t floor me. They were just the highest points. Bill Murray’s groundskeeper character trying to kill a gopher is neat, sure, but it never really made me cackle. I just wish Caddyshack had been funnier overall.

OVERALL

Caddyshack is a fine enough early 1980’s comedy effort, but it never really resonated with me. Compared to some other classic comic movies from the era–Airplane, The Naked Gun, A Fish Called Wanda, or Beverly Hills Cop for examples–it just didn’t measure up.