Hot Shots! (1991)

Director: Jim Abrahams

Cast: Charlie Sheen, Cary Elwes, Valeria Golino, Jon Cryer

Have I Seen It Before: Chalk another one up to the “I had cable in the 90s, so I had to have” although I imagine I did seek the film out at some point.

Did I Like It: There’s not a lot of room for creative criticism when it comes to films like this. It all boils down to: Is it closer to Airplane! (1980) or is it closer to the dreary—and thankfully curbed in recent years, after a quick look at Wikipedia—work of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. At least one part of ZAZ is directly—read: not just getting a contractual credit—involved. That’s a big step in the right direction. It was released earlier than 1996. That’s another step in the right direction. So, yes, this is “one of the good ones.” You will laugh more often than you don’t. Whether or not it bothers you if you’re laughing at something occasionally pretty stupid is a question you’re probably not concerned with if you have decided to watch Hot Shots!.

The only thought I think I can add to the discussion is wondering why there has yet to be some discussion, on some level—especially after the unassailable box office success of Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and the reasonable success of The Naked Gun (2025)—of doing a legacy sequel to this. Sure, Sheen may be a little bit harder to get an insurance bond on, but give him the same deal they gave Robert Downey Jr. in the 2000s: Make him put his own bond money up, incentivizing to finish the movie. It could a be a big success for him, and a reasonable amount of money for Disney. Hot Shots!: Topper. The poster sells itself. Get Jeff Bridges to play Lloyd Bridges son…

Why am I not pitching this right now?

Top Secret! (1984)

Director: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Cast: Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Christopher Villers, Michael Gough

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I’m not sure how I made it this far, either.

Did I Like It: I laughed, mostly at non sequitir, but then again I’m a sucker for that which avoids sequitirianism. On that front, as a comedy, it hit its target. Did I laugh as much as I might have in Airplane! (1980) or The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)? Probably not.

What went wrong? A couple of things. First, Val Kilmer isn’t really funny. At all. I’m mystified to learn (and am still more than a little skeptical that it actually went down this way) that he sang all of his songs through the film, but he’s just not funny at all. Somebody like Robert Hays or Leslie Nielsen can milk all of the laughs they want out of playing things straight, but Kilmer can’t find that magic. I did like seeing Kilmer play off of the great character actor Michael Gough—who can be funny—but that’s more for other reasons.

Any movie would be doomed if it is that fundamentally miscast for the number one on the call sheet, but problems go deeper than that. Spy movies can be spoofed, sure. As much as the whole shtick got a little tired, the first Austin Powers largely works. Other genres are apt, like cop movies and the disaster film. By now, literally every genre has gotten the treatment with wildly varying degrees of success. But who literally cares about Elvis pictures? Even those who view the King as some sort of semi-religious figure can’t with a straight face claim that Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Blue Hawaii (1961) were worth a damn. A genre has to have some sort of quality to it before it can be ripe for satire. The Elvis movie is barely a genre, much less a beloved one.

Airplane! (1980)

Director: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. I always preferred Airplane Ii: The Sequel (1982), but then again I was ten, and not terribly bright. But this film had the first pair of boobs I had ever seen legitimately. Man alive, PG really meant something different back in the day.

Did I Like It: This movie has a lot to answer for. It was a big—and far more importantly, relatively cheap—hit, and as often happens in these cases, the wrong lessons were learned. Thus, they make an army of similar movies, that’s why in the early aughts*, you got an endless series of “spoof” movies that were just an endless series of the same old gags reproduced over and over again. I’ll admit, Scary Movie (2000) probably has quite a bit of blame in that combination, but it’s sort of like blaming the parents of Typhoid Mary for what happened after. But now that I think about it, if Typhoid Papa and Typhoid Mama taught the apple of their eye about proper disease prevention…

This is the part where all of the passengers line up to beat me senseless, right?

Anyway, what separates this from all of the immitators that came to follow? One might be tempted to say that the ZAZ team is the secret ingredient, but all of them eventually went on to make films that were far more part of the problem than not. For every Naked Gun that was to come, there were also An American Carol (2008), Rat Race (2001) (which I didn’t hate, but didn’t love), and even a few of those Scaries Movie (that’s how you pluralize those) in there two.

I think the true secret ingredient that got forgotten along the way was not the act of making a story around the gag that is special in and of itself, but having an  (even if it is a bizarre sense of) affection for the types of movies being sent up. These early movies understood that the best spoof movies that have an affection for that with which they poke fun. Mel Brooks understood that, especially in the earlier years of his career. Those guys who I can’t even be bothered to look up who are trucking in those types of films these days. They’re just a few steps away from an AI engine randomly spitting out things that might have otherwise been tagged as humor.