Keep the joke a Top Secret!

Rating: 10/10 (28 December 2001)

Pound for pound, no comedy has made me laugh more than "Top Secret!". It's a satire by the Zucker Brothers (Airplane!) of both WWII flicks ( like the Great Escape) and Elvis Presley musicals. Think about the chronology for a minute.
Satire for the most part isn't done very well these days (see the awful 'Not Another Teen Movie' if you don't believe me). The trap that many satires today fall into is that they simply recreate a scene but they do not let you onto what it as about the scene or movie that it deserves to be zinged.
The Zucker Brothers know this. There's a satire early on of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" which starts with the familiar scene as we know it from Raiders but it soon goes into other areas before revealing itself as one of the more creative jokes in the movies.	That's really a theme to this movie. The scene start familiar as we know them, but get stranger as they play on before revealing themselves at the end. This is evident with the fist fight in the truck, or the famous "Swedish book store" scene. The Zucker brothers seem to take scenes that one step further than what everybody else would (something the Farelly brothers have picked up on). They also fill the whole screen with jokes
To comment on the acting is a exercise in futility (nobody goes to see Top Secret! for the acting) but here it goes:
The actors play this perfectly for a satire. Throughout the movie they are deadpan serious (even when a long lost love is 'measuring you up'). The actor can't be in on the jokes (another thing you see in newer satires). The casting is dead on as well. Similar to Airplane!, character actors play the key roles. You have Omar Sharif as a much abused spy ("This isn't the Howard Johnsons"), Michael Gough as a kidnapped scientist ("But what about my tunnel"), and Peter Cushing as the aforementioned Swedish bookstore owner. All of them seem to have fun poking fun at their more serious images
Top Secret is a satire up there with the 50's Warner Brothers, 70's Mel Brooks classics, and recent Farelly Brother romp- and don't let anybody tell you the joke before you watch