Green Beret officer Jim Morris (Ray Liotta) and an Army Captain played by Danny Glover manage to get the only elephant in a Vietnamese village shot by the VC in retaliation for the village having helped the Americans. Since the Americans need the village, they agree to find another elephant for it. They turn to a procurement officer played by Denis Leary in a role lifted out of CATCH 22. Leary finds an elephant along with a boy (Dinh Thien Le) who is the elephant's young trainer and companion. The Americans make a package deal of the elephant and the boy, but they are on a tight schedule to get the elephant to the village as promised in time for a key festival. To get him there they use all possible means of transportation and in turn get shot at with a complete selection of weaponry - mortars, rifles, surface-to-air missiles, you name it.

There is one point in the movie where they say to each other, "you guys look like McHale's Navy". It was at that point the central problem of the movie was clear. This was "McHale's Navy," but without humor. Although there were crazy situations in the movie, most of the humor fell flat with only the Glover and Liotta smiling to remind you that it was supposed to be funny. The script by Gene Quintano (of POLICE ACADEMY 3 and 4 fame), was boring. The director (Simon Wincer), who also did FREE WILLY, for some reason had the actors play the scenes very low key and reserved as if he was trying to be reverential to the war that killed so many. All of this made for a slow, tedious, and almost serious, movie that was a putative comedy. All of the actors seemed to be on autopilot and were there only to collect their fees.

The violence was handled gingerly. When the Americans and the VC met, the Americans would yank the guns out the enemy's hands and then just hit them with their fists or with gun butts only hard enough to knock them out. Nevertheless, this was a war and exploding bombs, bullets, and missiles meant to kill the Americans can be scary to children.