Captain Pantoja And The Special Services

Originally listed at an inconceivable 137 minutes and subsequently trimmed to a merely bloated two hours, Captain Pantoja And The Special Services takes a decent one-joke premise and stretches it into a military satire, a straight-faced romantic melodrama, and a bawdy T&A romp. Too ambitious for raunch, not ambitious enough for meaningful social commentary, the film might have succeeded on a strictly prurient level, if only it came about its exploitation honestly. But Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi, working from a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, tries to pass off Cinemax after-hours fare as M*A*S*H revisited, draping ample flesh in tattered thematic rags. The one joke involves the title character, a straitlaced and happily married military man, being assigned to set up a makeshift brothel in the Amazon jungle, where recruited prostitutes can do their part to improve troop morale. The captain (played by Salvador del Solar, who doesn't take to being a comic foil) prides himself on the order, discipline, and integrity of a great Army man, which is precisely why his superiors think he's a perfect candidate for the job. In no time, he turns the backwater outpost into a model of pimping efficiency, but he's helplessly drawn to the irresistible Angie Cepeda, a va-va-voom nymphet in the Jayne Mansfield/Claudia Cardinale mold. The first half of Captain Pantoja milks a few pleasant gags out of del Solar's attempts to treat the sex business like any other military operation, with bloodless terminology (a whore is called "a visitor," and a trick is called "a rendering"), precision timing, and official reports to the top brass. The gratuitous nudity doesn't hurt, either; at least it's in the spirit of lowbrow fun. But as it goes along, the film grows increasingly distracted by superfluous characters and dull lapses into seriousness: Domestic spats between del Solar and abrasive wife Mónica Sánchez, a potential revolt by the local reserves, a gold-toothed radio personality (Aristóteles Picho) who threatens to expose the operation, self-serving military officials, a lustful priest, and so on. Beyond a few obvious jabs at the moral hypocrisy of public officials, the satire never registers, unless the references are so culture-specific that they can only be recognized by Peruvians. If Lombardi weren't so reluctant to admit that his movie is little more than a silly sex comedy, he might have had a trashier and more erotic Night Shift, with Cepeda as a major improvement on the Shelley Long role. But in reaching for something more, Captain Pantoja achieves a lot less.