"Gung Ho" is advertised as a clash of cultures after the Japanese reopen the automobile factory

in a small Pennsylvania town. That sounded promising. I guess I was hoping for one of those
movies made out of loving attention to detail, in which we and the Japanese would both be
treated like eccentric laboratory specimens. What I got was a disappointment, a movie in which
the Japanese are mostly used for the mechanical requirements of the plot, and the Americans are
constructed from durable but boring stereotypes.
I think the fault is in the screenplay, which tells a story that can be predicted almost from the
opening frames. The people who wrote this movie did not bother, or dare, to give us truly
individual Japanese characters; there is only one who is developed with any care.
Nor did they think much about how a Japanese automaker might really impact on a small
American town. The movie feels more like an attack on labor unions than a clash of alien
cultures, and the message seems to be that the American car industry would be as successful as
the Japanese if our workers were willing to work for $8 an hour, seven days a week, with unpaid
overtime, just because of their patriotic pride.
If there is life in the movie - and there is a good deal - it's because two of the actors labor
manfully to create more than the script provides them. Michael Keaton plays the local workers
representative, the go-between who's supposed to represent management to the workers, and vice
versa. And Gedde Watanabe plays the Japanese plant manager, a man whose oddball humor and
quiet intelligence make him rebel against the home office. Watanabe and Keaton conspire to
outsmart the owners and the workers and save the plant, and they also conspire to almost save
the movie, by adding unexpected twists and turns to the dialog. They're good.
The movie, alas, is not. The story begins with Keaton going to Japan on a mission to convince
the Japanese to locate their factory in his little town. These opening scenes are so slack-jawed
and sophomoric that the movie hardly recovers from them. Keaton gets lost in Tokyo, right? So
we're supposed to laugh at the sight of him wading into a rice paddy to ask directions, right?
Wrong. And it's not funny when he acts like an insulting lamebrain in his presentation to the
Japanese executives. Comedy shouldn't try to be funny; it should allow us to find the humor for
ourselves. "Gung Ho" doesn't give us that chance.
Anyway, back in Hadleyville, the assembly line starts up, and right away there are problems,
because the Japanese expect the Americans to behave like the Japanese. The Americans get
restless, you see, when they're not given sick leave, asked to work free overtime, and constantly
get shouted at by Japanese managers. They could complain to their union, except, in an earlier
scene, the union representative has been shouted down at a workers meeting. The guys are so
happy to have jobs that they're non-union.

As I was watching the tension develop, I got restless, because, from what I read, this is not the
way the Japanese run their auto factories in this country. Couldn't the movie find humor in a
more realistic treatment, instead of depicting the Japanese in such insulting, one-dimensional
details? And, for that matter, was it necessary to show the American workers as a monolithic
crowd that apparently hangs out together all of the time, 24 hours a day, so that a Fourth of July
celebration can be turned into a workers' meeting and nobody is absent? Keaton and Watanabe
give promise of what the movie could have been like. In one good scene, they get drunk together
at the bowling alley, and Watanabe sings the company anthem while Keaton restrains him and
reassures the patrons, "He'll be back, folks; there's a midnight show." Keaton is a fast-thinking,
wisecracking actor, sort of a young Jack Nicholson, who was good in "Night Shift" and is good
again here.
Watanabe is a more subtle discovery. He was the hapless foreign exchange student in "Sixteen
Candles," a one-dimensional role, but here he's funny, complicated and surprisingly likable. He is
an American whose Japanese accent slips all over the place before it is sort of abandoned at the
end, but his character is believable in a sea of phoniness.
Examples of the screenplay's desperation: There are not one, but two, fistfights in lieu of
dramatic development. Scenes on the assembly line are choreographed like music videos. A
girlfriend is introduced for Keaton, and then inexplicably dropped. Some scenes are played as if
the movie were realistic, others as if it were a sit-com, still others as if it were slapstick. George
Wendt, playing one of the guys on the assembly line, is demoted to janitor, and then turns up in
every scene clutching his broom like a spear-carrier at the opera; he is given nothing to do except
act as a proletarian mirror for every twist of the plot.
The movie was directed by Ron Howard, whose last credit was the enchanting "Cocoon." He
should have started this movie with a rewrite.