We saw Dr. Strangelove last night, and it validates my rule: All four-star movies are two-star movies.

This one is a perfect example. It's intelligently written and well acted, but it's mostly incoherent, and there aren't enough laughs to save it:

• Who is Miss Foreign Affairs, and why is she in this picture? Apart from the pointless and gratuitous plaid-bikini scene, her character figures in only two other places: She's in the bombardier's Playboy (huh?), and she calls Turgidson in the war room, where he tells her never to call him there and promises to return as soon as he can. Then we forget all about her. You can't argue that she's used to illustrate Turgidson's character, because it's not clear that there's anything untoward in their relationship. She could be his wife, for all we know.
• Whence the subtitle "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"? What does this have to do with the movie? The film has no protagonist, and uses an omniscient point of view. No one learns to love the bomb, and no one fails to learn to love the bomb. (Yes, I know it's a satire.) This is just a throwaway joke that refers to nothing and makes no sense.
• More to the point, why name the film after an unnecessary character with the smallest role in the picture? Dr. Strangelove appears in two scenes, both of which could easily have been cut.
• Speaking of which, why the weird coda at the end? Slim Pickens rides the bomb down, triggering the Soviet doomsday device and ending the world. This has all been shown to us plainly; the whole movie was building toward it. But after humanity's fate is sealed, Strangelove gives a weird, overlong, demonstrably pointless and, in my opinion, excruciatingly unfunny soliloquy about creating colonies in mineshafts in order to save humanity. This makes absolutely no sense. Pursuing this plan would take weeks, and they'll all be dead in a few hours. It's offered as a serious idea; people ask logistical questions, and Strangelove answers them. The scene drags on and on. It seems to promise more plot to come, but we already know it can't happen. It destroys any impact of the climax, and negates the long, boring buildup of "tension" as the B-52 approached its target. This is probably the single stupidest, most confounding self-sabotage of any narrative in my experience, excepting The African Queen.

It just goes on and on. It bills itself as "the hot-line suspense comedy," but there's no suspense, only one hot-line scene, and precious little comedy. The pacing is very bad—Miss Foreign Affairs spends five minutes taking a simple phone message, but we jump from Mandrake's phone booth to the withdrawal of the bombers with no intermediate scenes.

The moral seems to be: authority figures are buffoons, and war is bad. Well, maybe both of those are true, but you need to do more than jeer at them to earn four stars. Terry Southern has the writing chops to score some really biting, insightful points, but he doesn't do it. The movie is written as broad farce, with characters named Jack D. Ripper and "Bat" Guano, but it's played as intellectual satire, and it sails pointlessly between these two targets. It has nothing to say, but the audience perceives that it's political satire and so congratulates itself anyway. I need more than that.