E.C. Segar's comic strip characters Popeye the Sailor Man, his sweetheart Olive Oyl, her dejected fiancé Bluto, the hamburger-eating Wimpy, and the townspeople of Sweethaven fail to emerge in this muddled live-action adaptation, directed by Robert Altman as if he were still doing "McCabe and Mrs. Miller". Altman, who doesn't appear to have seen any of the wildly popular Fleischer Studios cartoons which extended the comic strip, doesn't have the buoyancy for a musical-comedy, and the songs by Harry Nilsson are a leaden lot. As Popeye, Robin Williams squints and mutters disgustedly to himself, but he simply doesn't have the material to kick this thing into high gear; Shelley Duvall fares a bit better, yet both performances are ruined by the gloppy cinematography and the scrappy editing. Simply dreadful. NO STARS from ****
Review of Popeye
