“Canadian Bacon” is a strange film. It feels almost like two different films, one being a satire similar to “Dr. Strangelove” and the other being about a bunch of dumb friends fighting war like in “Stripes” and it never seems to work well together. The most interesting fact about the film is arguably the fact it is the only film directed by Michael Moore (“Fahrenheit 9/11”), that isn’t a documentary.

In “Canadian Bacon”, the unpopular President of America (Alan Alda “The Aviator”) finds himself talked into starting a new Cold War with Canada in attempt to boost his popularity with voters. The government’s anti-Canadian propaganda leads to a band of wannabe heroes led by Bud Boomer (John Candy “Uncle Buck”, “Home Alone”) to take the fight directly to the Canadians.

I like Alan Alda as the unnamed leader of America; he’s kind-of funny. The scenes where he believes Canada has hacked into America’s nuclear missile systems reminds me a lot of “Dr. Strangelove”. John Candy is not particularly funny here. There seems to be a whole host of famous faces including Rip Torn (“Men In Black”), Rhea Perlman (“Matilda”), James Belushi (“Red Heat”), Dan Aykroyd (“Ghostbusters”) and Steven Wright but none of them are exactly good. Watch out for Michael Moore’s cameo as a gun toting American.

“Canadian Bacon” doesn’t know whether it wants to be “Stripes” or “Dr. Strangelove” so it instead throws half-baked versions of both at us and hopes it’ll work. The film was not much of a success and I suspect that’s why that to this day, Moore has chosen to do only documentary films. There are parts of “Canadian Bacon” that are clever and funny but much of it is only mildly amusing and some of it is just plain pointless. Maybe you desperately need to see a film in which the U.S.A. and Canada go to war and if that’s the case then you should see this movie but for everybody else, I’d watch something else.