Top Secret! (1984)
Directed by Jim Abrahams
Popular and dashing American singer Nick Rivers travels to East Germany to perform in a music festival. When he loses his heart to the gorgeous Hillary Flammond, he finds himself caught up in an underground resistance movement. Rivers joins forces with Agent Cedric and Flammond to attempt the rescue of her father, Dr. Paul, from the Germans, who have captured the scientist in hopes of coercing him into building a new naval mine.
7 connections found
View:
7 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Top Secret! to
The early sections of the film reminded me of when Zucker and Abrahams were still funny, as with Top Secret! and Hot Shots!: you know, goofy and silly but not stupid.
The truly inspired scenes are far outnumbered by the familiar ones recycled from earlier spy spoofs like Austin Powers and Top Secret!
At times it is perhaps too comic; Tom Hollander's sneering Kaiser Wilhelm is like something that snuck in from the Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker spy spoof, "Top Secret!"
This opening is so thoroughly over-the-top absurd that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Val Kilmer’s character from the spy spoof “Top Secret!’’ turned up as the quickly dispatched chief of IMF (alas, it’s an unbilled Tom Wilkinson).
Advertisement
On the other hand, if they had, it wouldn't make Hot Fuzz such a blast: the best genre satire since Top Secret! and the best film of any sort so far this year.
Or, for that matter, a Top Secret!-like tapestry of nuttiness mostly untethered to things like plot and character development.
…and Top Secret! to the putrid and barely tolerable Wayans brothers' I'm Gonna Git You Sucka and the first two Scary Movies (which Friedberg and Seltzer co-wrote along with four other writers) to Friedberg and Seltzer's Epic Movie and Vampires Suck, films whose instantly forgettable titles signal a knowing level of unimportance.