Gomer Pyle gets lucky.

People can do some pretty appalling things. They can lie and they can steal. They can exhibit callous disregard for human life and willful ignorance of the world around them. They can be mean, stupid, and vindictive. Humanity ain’t always noble, not even in the military. If you’re going to have a problem with that, it’s best you avoid Buffalo Soldiers.

A dark comedy about life on a U.S. military base in West Germany near the end of the cold War, Buffalo Soldiers stars Joaquin Phoenix as Ray Elwood, who can perhaps best be described as the evil twin of MASH’s Radar O’Reilly. He’s the company clerk who can lay his hands on pretty much anything and find a way to turn it into profit. In one of the movie’s earliest sequences, he manipulates his ineffectual commander (Ed Harris, playing against type) into ordering 1000 gallons of Mop & Glo that he then sells on the janitorial black market.

Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris

Things change for Elwood when a new top sergeant arrives on base. Sergeant Lee (Scott Glenn) recognizes Elwood immediately for what he is, and makes it his mission to shut down Elwood’s operations. In retaliation, Elwood starts dating the top’s teenage daughter (Anna Paquin, in the movie’s most interesting performance) and things escalate from there. Add to that the affair he’s having with his commander’s wife and the cache of highly marketable arms that he stumbles across and you can see that Elwood has a lot on his plate.

So who are the good guys here? Not Elwood, certainly, though you sense in him the potential to reform. Not really Sergeant Lee, either, who seems to be busting Elwood more for the thrill of it than through any deep-seated morality. Harris’ Colonel Berman is well meaning but too much of a sad sack to inspire admiration, and the rest of the soldiers are either opportunists like Elwood, violent psychopaths or stoned losers. So you find yourself more or less rooting for Elwood and his merry band of heroin cookers, if for no other reason than he seems the least likely to kill anybody on purpose.

He wouldn't touch her like that if he'd seen X-Men.

But who cares about sympathetic characters, what of the satire? Does Buffalo Soldiers have a point to make, and does it make it in a humorous, insightful and/or shocking way? Well, kind of and sometimes. Its message is there but fuzzy, its satirical points only occasionally sharp. The nihilism of the characters translates to the movie itself, as in the scene where a couple of stoned soldiers, unexpectedly called upon to drive a tank, end up plowing through a German marketplace, crushing cars and blowing up a gas station without even noticing. Director Gregor Jordan skates back and forth over the line between playing this for laughs and playing it for horror. When it’s over, though, and Elwood stumbles across the scene we see it through his eyes: as something that happened and can now be turned to his advantage. It’s not a comforting point of view but it can be interesting, at least up until the over-wrought third act, which turns a bit operatic for my taste.

So is Buffalo Soldiers anti-American or anti-military? Of course not, don’t be silly. It has some points to make about the military, mostly concerning bureaucracy and the role of the soldier during peacetime. But I think if the movie is anti-anything, it’s anti-human nature, depicting a certain variety of person who will get into exactly as much trouble as circumstances will allow. I guess the reason we root for Elwood is because he also finds a way to get himself out.

Gorilla Pants rating: 2.5 out of 4 bananas