Made in Virginia

There was a brief period in the mid-1990s when Hollywood felt that military movies headlined by sitcom stars was a solid, bankable idea.You had Down Periscope featuring Kelsey Grammar as a Navy submarine captain leading a ragtag group of misfits. You also had Sgt. Bilko with Steve Martin as an Army sergeant leading a ragtag group of misfits. Renaissance Man from 1994, In the Army Now also from 1994, McHale’s Navy from 1997, all of them featuring ragtag misfit groups doing right, eventually, for their commanding officer.

This might have all come about due to Hot Shots!, the surprisingly successful Top Gun parody that came out in 1991 and made $181.1 Mil against its $26 Mil budget. Not all of them could parody a successful film, but there were plenty of comedy writers willing to try their skills at making something funny from military material. Not very many of them succeeded, though, and what might have been a moderately successful genre instead featured a lot of rushed, ill-conceived films making very little bank against their budgets.

By that measure, 1995’s Major Payne was, indeed, one of those films. Starring Damon Wayans, the film perfectly fits the template of the genre we’re discussing. It has a washed up military man forced to take a job overseeing a ragtag group of misfits so he can beat them into shape and earn their trust. Along the way they bond and find common ground, leading up to his squad of losers finding it within themselves to be soldiers. And hell, like many of the other works at the time (Sgt. Bilko, McHale’s Navy), it was even based on an existing work: The Private War of Major Benson from 1955.

As with that film, the key twist for Major Payne to the standard military comedy formula was that the ragtag group of misfits our protagonist, Maj. Benson Winifred Payne, has to oversee are a bunch of JROTC kids. They’re the outcasts, the orphans, the ones forced to live at a boarding school not because they want to be there but because they have nowhere else to go. And under Payne’s tutelage, presumably, they’ll become a lean, mean fighting force ready to take on whatever challenge awaits them at the climax of the film. It’s all very basic outside of the fact that it’s a bunch of kids instead of adult soldiers.

Filmed in Charlotte, Virginia (which is also where the film takes place), Major Payne was directed by Nick Castle, who had previously worked on some solid (if not financially successful) films, like The Last Starfighter and The Boy Who Could Fly. Castle was certainly in a bit of a low period when he took on Major Payne. He’d handled the decently successful, if not culturally impactful, Dennis the Menace two years prior, and then went on to helm the disastrous Mr. Wrong with Ellen Degeneres the next year before taking a long break from directing altogether.

Watching Major Payne, you can see why: Castle isn’t a very interesting or effective director. There’s probably a way to make a film like Major Payne work on some level, but Castle doesn’t know how. This is a hacky, schlocky film that goes for the basest, lowest-tier laughs, assuming “gags” like fart noises and sped-up filming to make people seem like they’re moving faster are the absolute height of comedy. And he gets some of the worst performances out of his actors, leading to a flat and uninteresting mess that feels more like a made-for-TV kids film than anything that should have been released in theaters.

Not helping matters is Damon Wayans, though. Wayans is a stand-up and sketch comedy actor who starred on Saturday Night Liver before, later, getting TV-famous on In Living Color. He’d play wacky, strange characters that would last a sketch or two, mining laughs from absurdity, and in a short, five minute sketch, that kind of humor works. His Payne plays like one of these characters, except drawn out across the length of an entire film. He has a strange way of talking, makes obviously improvised line readings, and generally does his own thing the whole time, and it just doesn’t work. The worst part of this film is Wayans and it's pretty clear that Castle, as a director, was ill-equipped to try and keep the film on track with Wayans doing his thing the whole time.

Not that I think this film could really be saved even if everything were on track otherwise. The fact is that this film is a very basic story you’ve likely seen many, many times before. A group of slob kids have to buck up and pull together so they can take on the snob kids from a different military school. If you swapped military school for summer camp you’d have the basic outline of Meatballs, and it doesn’t take much to repurpose the same idea into any other genre, which Hollywood has been doing for decades now, ever since the likes of Caddyshack, Animal House, and Stripes. Within seconds of the film getting to its military school setting I knew how the whole film was going to play out, and Major Payne never did anything noteworthy enough to shake that opinion.

Although it would also help if the film actually identified the other school as “snobs” and gave us any character development on that side. Payne versus his students is a dynamic we can predict all too quickly, but just having someone else for the students to battle against, for us as the audience to root against, would help for the narrative momentum of the film. We barely see any of the other schools the students compete against, so we don’t identify them as anything more than background filler. Whether the kids win or lose in their climactic event doesn’t matter to us because, without development of the other schools, it’s already a foregone conclusion. We need more from this film, and it doesn’t provide it.

In fact, I think giving it a JROTC setting with a bunch of little kids as his “command” actually hurts the film a lot. We can’t have any crass humor or off-color jokes in the film, nothing that plays to Wayan’s comedy strengths that he honed on SNL and In Living Color, because this film stars a bunch of little kids, making this a family film. The humor has to appeal to the under-12 set, leading to a lot of corny jokes and silly humor that would have been more at home on Nickelodeon than in a film starring Wayans. You can feel the movie, and the actor, straining to do something interesting or funnier but, no, the movie can’t allow for that. I bet the outtakes from the film are hilarious; the movie itself is not.

Part of the reason many other films in the slobs vs. snobs genre work is because they can go blue and enjoy reveling in dirty humor. All those films I mentioned before, the ones that worked and that people love, were meant for adults and they let their crass, crude humor fly. If you made this film about college ROTC students going through the same motions you probably have a more enjoyable film just because you wouldn’t have to tone down the humor. There would have been no need to make this as a family film then so that all audiences could enjoy it.

Of course, all audiences did not, in fact, enjoy it. Most people really hated it, and the film only made $30 Mil at the Box Office. It was a resounding failure, critically and commercially, and then was largely forgotten by most. Major Payne, in short, is a bad film, the kind of bargain basement kids flick that now lurks on streaming platforms (which is where I saw it and decided to give it a watch simply because it was there and I’d never seen it before). It didn’t need to exist, and it’s better if it just stays dead.