Steve Martin's long, dull slide into the genre of pastel-knitwear-and-wailing-babies has been a sad business. Seemingly every year brings a worse movie, a weaker script and a more non-supportive supporting cast.
Martin-as-Sgt. Bilko is something of an improvement (Andy Breckman's script has eight-to-ten laugh-aloud gags), although it's not fractionally as clever or as fast-paced as the television series upon which it's based. The action has been transposed from Kansas in the 1950s to present day California (Bilko selling Meet Stormin' Norman raffle-tickets; the soldiers have bedrooms) and the mixed-sex platoon is over-played for goofiness, like Martin's troupe of firemen in Roxanne.
Martin, since the movie isn't dependent on plot, essentially chills out and reprises his con man Freddie from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And indeed, who should be his long-suffering fiancee, Rita, but that movie's Glenne Headly. Her conquest is one target of Bilko's arch-enemy Major Thorn (Hartman); the other is to have Bilko transferred to Greenland.
Unfortunately, the comedy lurches like a poorly mule. No one can decide which style should reign: Martin's wild-and-crazy slapstick; Police Academy ensemble boneheadedness; director Jonathan Lynn's verbal by-play; Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker sight gags; or Saturday Night Live-type "yo! topicality!" audience-pleasers (e.g. a reference to gays in the US Army). Aykroyd is - correctly - cuddly and slow-witted as Colonel Hall; Hartman, however, plays Thorn as a full-tilt panto villain. The late Phil Silvers - whose daughter, Catherine, appears as a snooping auditor - would surely have departed for the bar.