Good Morning Vietnam – 1.5 stars
Based on a true person if not story, Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) is a popular disc jockey stationed in Vietnam where he entertains the troops with his wacky hijinks, falls in love with a local gal, has a run in with her Viet Cong brother, and finds out that the true enemy is not the North Vietnamese, but an uptight sergeant (J.T. Walsh) who hates his funny so much he routes him through a VC-controlled highway, presumably, because he hopes he will be killed.
Because Cronauer is a wise ass, and later, a humanitarian, he must die.
Barry Levinson’s (Diner, The Natural) schmaltz fest is really just a vehicle for Williams to be zany. He more than delivers. In the doing, the men love him and snigger at the squares who do not, including the sergeant who so hates bits, sound effects, impressions, and double entendres he tries to have Cronauer killed.
But our watermelon-smashing Gallagher Christ, he won’t be held down. Not after this pep talk:
EDWARD
And I literally think that you owe it to all of them to get your ass back on the air.
ADRIAN
If you haven’t noticed, the army doesn’t really want me, Ed. They’ve been harassing me since the day I got off the plane.
EDWARD
So what? It’s the guys in the field that matter, remember? Those are the guys that are dyin’.
A homogenous 80s sit-com fluff ball with half-hearted altruistic pretensions, powered solely by Williams’ manic energy, which, to be fair, can be entertaining.
filmvetter 
Yeah, the movie seemed better back when I first saw it in the 1980s. I rewatched it about a decade ago and it fell flat. The whole story seemed stupid – not just because it was a vehicle for William’s manic energy, but also for his grade-school morality. The scenes with William interacting with the Vietnamese people were so schmaltzy that they made me want to avert my eyes.
Williams was a brilliant comedian and an underrated dramatic actor, but too many of his movies were ruined by excessive sentimentality that didn’t age well. DEAD POETS SOCIETY; AWAKENINGS; THE FISHER KING; JACK; PATCH ADAMS. I suspect he picked those films in part because he overvalued that sentimentality.
Boy, are you right about Robin Williams. His best roles were anything that took him away from that cloying, prematurely, boyish, zany goo of sentimentality. Insomnia, Good Will Hunting, The Birdcage. I’ll even give him Dead Poet’s Society, only because he played an adult throughout, even if the whole thing was too much confection, too little cake. If memory serves, he also did a guest appearance on one of the Homicide shows, where I think he played a tourist in Baltimore, whose wife was killed in what was the general drug violence at the time. He was really quite good and it served as an untaken avenue for him in terms of straight dramatic roles. But what Hollywood, and ultimately, the audiences wanted, was him running around in drag, a man child even before he went drag (he did cartoon voices for a living), stomping out flames from his chest with potholders in Mrs. Doubtfire.