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.