Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Top Secret!

9/3/2015

C-
1.52

When I watch a film like Top Secret, I lose faith in humanity - Lane
I laughed too much to be able to say I didn't like it - Jon
Top Secret was meant to make viewers laugh, and, for me, it was a success - Drew

Initial Review by Tom

I first encountered this movie either in college or in high school. It was on late at night on some random channel. It stuck in my mind because it had a very young Val Kilmer and it turned out to be slapstick. This combination and the foggy memory of the fog of whatever had occurred previously in the night that led up to that viewing has colored my memory of the movie.

Last night that memory was torn asunder as the clarity of mind and spirit brought the plot, lazy jokes, and pure cheesiness into sharp focus. The movie starts out strong with weird almost dada musical number. It then has some great sight gags and even an unexpected twist on an old painting joke. (i would hang val’s painting in my house). It quickly devolves into endless juvenile sex jokes. I wouldn't’ mind this as much if they kept up the more clever gags. I think this may also be different from how I first saw the movie as it was edited for TV. The cheap jokes made this movie feel juvenile and filled me with longing for the high-brow-by-comparison airplane series.

Anyway sorry about this pick. D

22 Comments

Sean

9/1/2015 03:03:58 pm

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen this movie from the very beginning and on something other than basic cable. That said I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately Top Secret is a movie whose sum is lesser than its parts. After watching it altogether I've determined that it's best enjoyed in snippets as you surf through the channels. Most scenes have enjoyable enough gags but stretch them out scene after scene and they lose their enjoyment. It will always work in 3 minute segments so I'll give it a C- instead of the D it would probably get if this was the only time I've seen it.

Lane

9/1/2015 03:35:22 pm

I feel good about the state of humor in American film. Why? Mainly because I don’t think a movie like “Top Secret!” would be green lit in Hollywood today. Or, at least, I hope it wouldn’t. “Top Secret!” comes from the same loins as “Airplane” and “Naked Gun” and “Robin Hood Men in Tights” and while those films went on to get Ivy League educations and make their parents proud, “Top Secret!” got his girlfriend pregnant, dropped out of high school, tried to study up for the GED with a Kaplan test but was too high when he wasn’t delivering pizzas to really pay attention, and now he’s buried somewhere in the Netflix database earning a dollar or two for his parents every time schmucks like us recommend him for a movie club.

I’d like to think (hope to think) they don’t make films like “Top Secret!” anymore. Or, maybe it’s that the American movie public at large has moved past movies like this. Yes, there will be a Wayans brothers movie that comes in #1 at the box office every once in a while (which are also affiliated with the Zucker bro’s), but other than that I’m having trouble thinking of a terrible slapstick lampoon comedy that has come out in the last ten years that actually did well. Has there been another one that’s actually been a hit?

What gives me hope in the stupid-comedy genre is films like “This is the End” and “The Interview.” Or the “21 Jump Street” reboots. Or the “Ted” films. Are these great cinema? No, of course not. But, Lord have mercy, they seem like Orson Welles compared to “Top Secret!” They aren’t highbrow in any sense of the word, and yet those films seem like someone actually conceived them somewhere besides a blackout drunk night at Burt Reynold’s Malibu house. It seemed they took more than two weeks to write and film. It seemed like they picked slightly more nuanced targets to lampoon than Pizza Hut and midgets. It seems like they might understand that the Nazi's weren't actually in charge of East Germany.

When I watch a film like “Top Secret!” I lose hope for humanity. It helps me to think of the Zucker brothers sitting in a dark lawyers’ office (maybe like Saul Goodman’s; or like Shane’s), having spent their entire advance for this movie on cocaine and hookers, hysterically crying because they owe a bookie in Central-Alameda named Chicken Man $300,000 and Pacino isn’t answering to loan it to them, and they can’t get the rest of the money until they deliver this script, and so they’re sweating and crying and hugging each other, fueled by amphetamines they bought off a man named Bovon Aarksdale, thinking of every terrible joke they could possibly have, then deciding to even make fun of things that aren’t actually that funny like Ford Pinto explosions and Uhaul trucks and Peter Sellers and high interest rates. And then they went and individually made “Hot Shots” and “Ghost” and “BASEketball” and now they’re old men with more money than God and they don’t care if we hate “Top Secret!” or not. But hopefully, they hate that they made this movie.

That’s what helps me sleep at night.

Liked:
- Chocolate Mousse
- Cow fellatio

Ambivalent About:
- Most everything else in this movie

Disliked:
- Everything I wasn’t ambivalent about

Grade: F

9/1/2015 04:11:42 pm

Ok, BASEketball is good.

Black out drunk at Burt Reynolds Malibu mansion sounds like paradise to me.

Likebot

9/3/2015 05:03:07 am

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Shane

9/3/2015 04:13:29 am

Whoa. I'm usually the one who abuses run on sentences. Bravo.

9/3/2015 04:55:27 am

I don't even know where to begin with Top Secret!. There's just so much that went wrong, yet I actually laughed out loud to more than I'd like to admit. It's a poorly written and unintelligent parody that has moments of superb execution. Then again, there are so may gags thrown against the wall that eventually something would have to stick.

I think the most glaring problem is the casting of Val Kilmer. I love Kilmer, even though I know he's a dick in real life. He made Tombstone. He was the perfect foil in Top Gun. Hell, he's still my second favorite Bat Man. But I just don't like him as the straight man here. He's too stiff and probably too good-looking. When he does funny things, it just doesn't seem to make sense in my brain. So I don't think it's a great start to have your lead not mesh with the story.

Another issue are the gags. This movie can't seem out figure out what kind of parody it is. There is just too much going on here and it causes a lack of cohesiveness. Is it a spy parody? A music parody? A WWII parody? There's too much going on.

It's incredibly dated as well. You look at Space Balls, which I think stands up much better, and look at my two favorite gags: We ain't found shit! and the bumper stickers. Those jokes still make sense 30 years later. But with Top Secret!, you have jokes about some celebrity I don't even know and an exploding Pinto, which is a thing that most people probably don't realize was a thing. (It's also a great example of punitive damages in your first Torts class. That and the correctly decided McDonald's hot coffee case. If you don't think that case was decided correctly, Google Stella Liebeck injuries and check out the images. Great times.) Because we are so far removed from those pop culture references, the movie ends up sputtering when watching it in 1984 it may have sailed along. I think a good parody makes the cliches a joke. The characters are the gags. That requires performance. Here, the actors are just puppets who's actions are merely done to get to the writer's next joke.

"Jim Abrahams: Then we figured the best thing to do was to put together a bunch of our favorite jokes – really good jokes -- and string it together with what seemed like a story and that’s what wound up being ‘Top Secret!.’"

"Jerry Zucker: I think some of our best jokes are in ‘Top Secret!,’ but it’s really hurt by not having a story. It doesn’t have much of a story or a hook."

Those are from creators of the film. I was looking something up to jog my memory on the funniest scenes and that popped up, which is very convenient for what I was saying.

So, what was good:
Saying they're talking in Swedish and then doing the whole scene in reverse. That was great.

I liked the underwater barfight. The execution there had to take forever. I liked that the scene got better and more complex as it went along.

The tiny castle to demonstrate their plan that was built was pretty good.

Cow fellatio.

Overall, this is a C-. I laughed too much for it to be a D.

9/3/2015 07:08:00 am

The good jokes and no story completely makes sense why I remember this movie better than on this review. Those gags are what you remember leaving you a positive feeling looking back on it.

9/3/2015 07:43:53 am

I can imagine catching a snippet here and there and think this was OK.

9/3/2015 05:44:43 pm

It's weird that there were a few times I actually laughed out loud too (mostly the cow scenes) and yet I still kind've hated myself for laughing out loud.

I do have this very distinct childhood memory of watching the 48 Hours or Dateline or whatever show broke the Ford Pinto explosion thing (and they staged it, I think) and being terrified that our car was going to blow up if we got in an accident. It was the '80's, so it probably would have. Anyway....

9/3/2015 09:56:44 pm

I still feel guilty about laughing even though I see this has a 76 on Rotten Tomatoes. 76! Was everyone high with Topper when they wrote those reviews?

Bryan

9/3/2015 06:25:17 pm

"I don't even know where to begin with Top Secret!. There's just so much that went wrong, yet I actually laughed out loud to more than I'd like to admit. It's a poorly written and unintelligent parody that has moments of superb execution. Then again, there are so may gags thrown against the wall that eventually something would have to stick."

That is a great summary of this film.

However, I think casting Kilmer was fine. I was not a fan of Spaceballs either, but I love Airplane. I think Shane was on to something about the time narrative relating to the jokes. But, I think the biggest difference between Top Secret and Airplane is that Airplane touches every PC third rail - race, religion, gender, etc. Airplane starts and really hits word play hard. Top Secret has a good joke every 5 minutes or so - the cows, the castle diagram, most of the French stuff, But everything in between gives the viewer no reason to pay attention. The underwater scene was quite good and the opening montage was amusing.

I'm opening with C-

Drew

9/4/2015 11:09:19 pm

How can you love Airplane but not Spaceballs? How is that even attainable?

9/5/2015 12:11:17 am

The representative from Texas raises a good point.

9/8/2015 01:12:22 pm

I did reply to this, but it didn't go through. http://www.mediocremovie.club/reviews/spaceballs

" I thought breaking through the 4th wall was awful. I'm not a fan of self-aware movies. Joan Rivers was irritating, Helmet wasn't well done, the princess was shrill, Colonel Sanders was exhausting. A week prior to this nomination my students were talking about this movie in class - "I'm a mog, my own best friend." This could have been sold and used much, much more. The only funny part of Barf was his ears perking up."

9/8/2015 08:56:39 pm

That just stated how you didn't like Spaceballs, which doesn't answer my question. Also, your hatred for the film is wrong, sir!

Jon

9/9/2015 02:22:02 am

I'll take the Pizzahaus joke over Pizza the Hutt any day of the week. Both aren't great jokes, but Pizza the Hutt is a black mark on Mel Brooks's career.

9/4/2015 03:05:47 am

The Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team have an absurdly wide distance between their best and worst work. Their responsible for bringing Leslie Nielson to a wider audience, and I think we could probably agree that he's one of the greatest comedic performers ever. Between, and after, directing that series, Jerry Zucker went high-brow with Ghost and First Knight, Abrahams did the Hot Shots series, and David Zucker went off the deep end with the higher-numbered Scary Movies and the right-wing Iraq war apologia American Carol. If David Zucker's 21st century work is on one end (the bad one) and their collaboration on Naked Gun and Airplane is on the other, Top Secret is solidly in the middle. The jokes are indeed scattershot and untethered to silly concerns like plot and character, but whatever, this is silly and pointless enough to be enjoyable.

There's a foreboding sense of how bad spoof movies would eventually get in this. The ZAZ team is directly related to the Seltzer/Friedberg Superhero/Date/Insert genre Movie, and maybe that was always a part of their DNA. The worst iteration of reference humor is just including the reference with no extra joke i.e. fake Leonidas in Meet the Spartans kicking a bald Britney Spears into a pit. There's no joke there beyond identifying a pop culture punching bag. The extended Blue Lagoon spoof jumped out the most in that vein. I don't know if there's anything as overt in Airplane or Naked Gun, but Topper's certainly right to criticize it in Top Secret as lazy, though I admit to chuckling when the palm-leaf garage opener worked.

I had no idea Val Kilmer had a comedic resume that went beyond MacGruber. He seems so dour in his most productive, early-90's period, so seeing him in Top Secret was actually a pleasant surprise. He's no Nielson, but I thought he did fine, selling the performative aspect of his role and nailing some reaction shots. Replacing the book in the library is an obvious joke, but what can I say, I saw it coming and laughed anyway. No one else really jumped out as stealing the film from him.

This is not a strong movie, but I laughed in a barely-paying-attention kind of way. It wasn't outwardly offensive, and spoofs have lower expectations tied to them anyways. I'm in Shane territory. I laughed too much to be able to say I didn't like it. This is a weak C.

9/4/2015 11:07:41 pm

This film was so silly and Val Kilmer did a great job in his role. From the credits, which also had spoofs, it looked like he did all the singing in those "songs." What is surprising is they did not sound half bad.

Kilmer's ability to follow difficult choreography was on display. His best scene was in the Pizzahaus doing the song about straightening rugs. The scene in and of itself was simple but what made it fun was the dancing and singing. Kilmer did great at emulating Elvis.

The funny was in and out. Not to reiterate others, but Shane is correct. There were some great laugh out loud moments but some of the jokes were lost on me because of outdated pop culture references. Another favorite moment was when Kilmer and the lead actress whose name escapes me, say the movie was bad and then break the fourth wall with a slow moving look toward the camera. Well placed and nicely played.

Those are the very obvious positives but they also come with just as obvious negatives. The story was simply dumb. It did not care about the impossible or historical timelines. People dressed up in 50's sock-hop clothes while in an East German pizza parlor? Oh my.

There is no question that I am sucker for slapstick comedy but Top Secret! went a bit overboard. There were too many literal jokes for my taste. An actual janitor in the janitor's closet, a big magnet that attracted a nuclear submarine, names of the French underground resistance group, the "little German," etc. They made me snicker but they became too much.

Despite all that, Top Secret! was meant to make viewers laugh and for me, it was a success. The story and other large aspects kept it out of the "B" range but I laughed too much for it to be lower than a "C-."

Grade: C

Bobby

9/10/2015 04:28:40 pm

I couldn't get into this movie at all... Nothing about it grabbed me. Not the shitty parody song, not the characters, not the jokes.... not even the Anal Intruder.

Since I'm behind, I'll pretty much leave it at that. Val Kilmer did do an excellent job with what he had to work with... he didn't save the movie for me, but he gets some credit for doing good work.

Eh, D-

Cooker

9/14/2015 10:40:00 am

From the guys that brought us Airplane! comes Top Secret! You could tell it was by the same makers, but this one simply fell flat for me. I did chuckle a few times, although having not taken any notes like I usually do and watching this a day and half ago, I can’t remember anything specific that made me laugh. The only thing that’s ringing a bell is the Resistance member Latrine that kept getting hurt and running into scenes. Not that funny, not a great story, but not really a movie where I felt like I was checking how much time was left every 10 minutes. I’m giving this one a C-

Phil

9/14/2015 11:53:25 am

Really late to the party so I'll keep this brief...

+ Maybe I have a stupid sense of humor, but a lot of Top Secret worked on me. The breaking-the-fourth-wall stuff was fun (It's like we're in a really bad movie!), over-the-top absurd humor like the surfing-skeet opening was fantastic, and I derive way too much enjoyment out of beating a joke into the ground until it gets funny again (the breaking-the-windows-to-shoot gag comes to mind).
+ I actually thought the scene where the met the old man with the magnifying glass was kind of brilliant in that it was shown backwards to give some sort of magical quality to everything going on.
+ "There are no good white basketball players."
+ The acting wasn't as bad as you'd expect for a movie like this. I'd give it a hearty "passable."
- Ugh, musical numbers for humor. They will never work on me and there were two here.
- Definitely a shotgun over sniper approach to the jokes, and a lot were really bad and lazy. But when you write 278* jokes into a movie under 90 minutes, it's not all going to work.

Overall, it's tough for me to shit on this movie when I actually had fun watching it. Someone grab me a musket and surfboard, stat.

Grade: C+

*100% Accurate joke count

9/15/2015 11:04:14 am

Um, you loved the skeet surfing opening number but then complained about musical numbers. How about you don't like musical numbers when they aren't funny. Skeet surfing was hilarious though.

Top Secret!

C-
1.52

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Top Secret!

C-1.52

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C-
1.52