Not as great as The Airplane

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2019)

Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker are a great team of comedy writers/directors and two parts of "Airplane!" are one of the best examples of parody movies ever. Their "Police Squad!" was highly underappreciated TV series at the time and got infamously cancelled too soon but they made up later with "The Naked Gun" trilogy. Then there were "Hot Shots!" both of which were as influential in the parody genre as "Airplane!" and right until the very day I consider this Charlie Sheen driven movies masterpieces. And only after going through all these movies multiple times I discovered "Top secret!" and if I had watched it back in childhood I would have loved it as much as any movie mentioned above. From my today's point of view it is a solid entry in their filmography, jokes are funny and hilarious that I laughed so hard out loud at times (especially the underwater sequence - that was unexpected, creative and witty), great songs and wonderfully nostalgic soundtrack performed by the lead actor Val Kilmer himself in the rock 'n' roll style - you can even find yourself singing along with the songs. But Val was also one of the reasons I didn't like this movie the way I liked the other ZAZ creations; Val lacks charisma of Leslie Nielsen, Charlie Sheen or Robert Hays - he was great at impersonating Elvis and his moves, at singing but his acting just couldn't get through to me. I know it sounds a bit silly but I also didn't quite like the script: there should always be a good enough story but the plotline of "Top secret!" is messy, non-structured and abrupt; by the end of the movie I didn't have the feeling like I watched a movie, only a couple of sketches sewed together. All in all it wasn't a waste of time and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie but I won't watch it again.