Volunteers ** (1985, Tom Hanks, John Candy, Rita Wilson) – Classic Movie Review 6173

Tom Hanks and John Candy, the talented comedians from Splash! (1984), sign up together again for director Nicholas Meyer’s cynical but affectionate 1985 spoof comedy set in early Sixties Thailand.

There a rich, selfish socialite called Lawrence Bourne III (Hanks) is in debt and has joined the US Peace Corps by mistake, jumping on a flight to Southeast Asia. Once there he brazenly thinks he can organise the show to his advantage, when he is assigned to build a bridge. Candy plays Tom Tuttle from Tacoma and Rita Wilson plays Beth Wexler.

Written by Ken Levine and David Isaacs, it starts brightly, and gets useful laughter mileage out of parodying classic war films like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Stalag 17 and Apocalypse Now. But then it goes downhill as it moves into clichéd and slapstick comedy.

But Hanks’s brazen charm and Candy’s manic blustering see them through to some degree of success. The movie is watchable but it is not one of Hanks’s best though.

Also in the cast are Tim Thomerson, Gedda Watanabe, Allan Arbus, Xander Berkeley and George Plimpton.

Hanks and Wilson first met in 1981 on the set of TV’s Bosom Buddies (1980-82) and they were reunited on the set of this movie. They married three years later.