Volunteers
The movie cover for Volunteers.
Directed by	Nicholas Meyer
Produced by	Walter F. Parkes Richard Shepherd
Written by	Keith F. Critchlow David Isaacs Ken Levine
Starring	Tom Hanks John Candy
Music by	James Horner
Distributed by	TriStar Pictures
Release date(s)	August 16, 1985
Running time	107 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$25 million
Box office	$19,875,740

Volunteers is a 1985 comedy directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Tom Hanks and John Candy.

Plot [edit]

Lawrence Bourne III (Tom Hanks) is a spoiled rich kid with a large gambling debt in the 1960s. After his father, Lawrence Bourne Jr. (George Plimpton), refuses to pay his son's debt, Lawrence escapes his angry debtors by trading places with his college roommate Kent (Xander Berkeley) and jumping on a Peace Corps flight to Southeast Asia.

There he is assigned to build a bridge for the local villagers with Washington State University graduate Tom Tuttle (John Candy) and the beautiful, down-to earth Beth Wexler (Rita Wilson). What they do not realize is that the bridge is coveted by the Central Intelligence Agency, a local communist force, and the powerful drug lord Chung Mee (Ernest Harada).

Cast [edit]

• Tom Hanks Lawrence Bourne III
• John Candy Tom Tuttle
• Rita Wilson Beth Wexler
• Tim Thomerson John Reynolds
• Gedde Watanabe At Toon
• George Plimpton Lawrence Bourne, Jr.
• Ernest Harada Chung Mee
• Allan Arbus Albert Bardenaro
• Xander Berkeley Kent Sutcliffe

Production [edit]

The film was in the works for six years before it was made. Volunteers was filmed in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The filmmakers built a Thai village based on the Karen people of Burma's Golden Triangle, building the world's "longest suspension bridge" which was more than 250 yards long. A cast of over 100 people from all over the world, including Thai families, spent two and a half months filming.^[1]

Meyer states that the director of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver, read the script and complained that it "was like spitting on the American flag," and demanded changes. The changes were never made, but by the time the film was released, Shriver was no longer director, and Peace Corps officials were willing to endorse the movie.^[1][2]

This film marked the reunion of Hanks and Candy, who starred in Splash. It is also the film where Hanks met his future wife, Rita Wilson.^[3]

The scene in which Wilson and Hanks enjoy Coca-Cola was criticized as product placement, as TriStar was a unit of Columbia Pictures, then owned by The Coca-Cola Company. Co-writer Levine denies this, stating that the scene appeared in the first draft of the film written in 1980, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was to be the studio.^[4]

The film spoofs a number of David Lean epics, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, with the Washington State University Fight Song used in place of the "Colonel Bogey March"^{[citation needed]}.

Reception [edit]

Critical response [edit]

Reviews were generally mixed. The film has a 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes.^[5]

Gene Siskel stated that the film had "two lame performances by its leading actors, the vastly overrated Tom Hanks... and the consistently disappointing John Candy."^[6]

Box office [edit]

The movie debuted at No.2 at the box office.^[7]

See also [edit]

• List of American films of 1985

References [edit]

External links [edit]

• Volunteers at IMDb
• Volunteers at Rotten Tomatoes
• "Superior Smirk". Texas Monthly: 197. December 1985.