Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

I perfectly understand the impulse to satirize Cold War nuclear dealings. How do you work for peace by building missiles, Ronald? And released at the mad height of Reaganomical autocracy, this muddy blotch on the scintillating filmography of a great modern director aspires to be a sharp, shrewd, and audacious satire of the global arms race, but it rarely seizes me, or seemingly any audience, on any considerable comic or intellectual level. The movie starts promisingly enough with a commercial mocking the arms industry, a promo for the Luckup Industries "Peacemaker," a fighter drone guaranteed to "preserve our way of life," with shots of families and children in the background. There's a stroke of Dr. Strangelove as the company executives thrash out promotional schemes for the plane, but the fanatical boss wants a more hard-hitting ad crusade, something like, "Why do I fly it? On account of it kills."While the film plainly expects this brand of send-up to be shrewd and slashing, the film never takes any of it very far at all. Most frequently, the calculated gags seem too solemn. Not even Chevy Chase's peddling of military wares is ever very funny, though a booby-trapped urinal is clearly intended to be. Yes, Chevy Chase. And Wallace Shawn and Richard Libertini, all hilarious people. Libertini plays an immensely wealthy arms merchant who explains how recent changes to federal law not only legalize bribes to foreign dictators, but make those bribes tax deductible.But no one concerned appears to have had any clue where the film's tone should've been pitched. The black comedy approach is merely dealt with from time to time. The scathing digs at the arms industry are haphazard. The humor varies from the relatively keen to the dumb to the utterly absent. What is Weaver's character designed to be anyway? The widow of the Luckup sales rep whose deal is successfully taken over by Chase, one moment she is a matchless fraud, the next she's a brokenhearted widow, and thereafter that she's pursuing Chase and surrendering herself to the General.And Gregory Hines, an ex-fighter pilot now undergoing a religious crisis of conscience. After years of capitalizing off the wholesaling of death, he out of the blue finds religious conviction. Is this meant as a parody of born-again fanatics? Or is it just a narrative expedient to get us to the movie's utterly boring climactic warfare? Whatever the case may be, both actors are significantly wasted in their distracted roles. I would've been delighted to see this one and leave calling it unluckily misread or gravely undervalued, but the thing's an utter muddle most of the time.

This is a must see for any Chevy Chase fan or anyone who has ever worked at a large defense subcontractor! Office Space for the defense industry. I've worked at big companies (both defense and commercial) and this movie portrays them quite accurately. Even though the inherent humor in the plot line is based on the defense industry, it is very accessible to those who know little about it. Chevy is at his finest as the movie plays his character's extreme comical greed (i.e. will sell any weapon to anyone for any reason) against Gregory Hines' burgeoning conscience about their chosen profession. I was initially shocked by the low average rating of this movie. After reading some of the other reviews about this movie I begin to understand. Because Chevy plays an humorously amoral individual rather than his usually lovably goofy, one I think many viewers were shocked. I didn't think that the humor in this film was subtle; but apparently for many, it was. This movie also makes a very strong moral point about the military industrial complex that should be taught (whether with this movie or not) to all people before they are allowed to vote.

Deal of the Century is a serious action comedy that stars Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, Gregory Hines, Vince Edwards, Richard Libertini, Bradford English, and Charles Levin! There are many surprising moments in this picture. The action scenes are done very well. Chase and Weaver had good charisma together and they both looked really different. Hines was good as well. The special effects were really neat. William Friedkin's directing is great. I really can't see what is wrong with the movie. Give this movie a chance because its a very different film and the cast are in serious roles. So anyone who likes Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, and Gregory Hines give it a chance and check it out!

Messy satire on selling arms to third world nations that relies too heavily on Chase to carry us through. Chase does what he can, but even he cannot save Paul Brickman's unimaginative script.