One Paragraph Movie Review: Good Morning Vietnam

One hundred and ninety-fourth film: Good Morning Vietnam, and now I need a rest. The mostly-improvised scenes featuring Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer, military services radio DJ in 1965 Saigon, are easily the most memorable and oft-quoted bits of this bloody great movie. But the secondary stories and characters flesh out the manic treble with dramatically spongy bass — from a Vietnamese boy in the Viet Cong, to Forest Whitaker’s deeply endearing station assistant, to the admittedly stereotypically camp local owner of Jimmy Wah’s bar, to the gradually less-bewildered attendees of Cronauer’s English class, to Bruno Kirby’s profoundly unfunny Lieutenant trying to invent a French character called ‘Frenchy’ on air to cringing silence. There are very good swings from comedy to shocks, all coated in sweat and James Brown, and things that are coated with sweat and James Brown are often worth seeing twice, especially when Robin Williams is in them. Four and three quarter shiny green suits out of five.