Misfire

Rating: 4/10 (7 September 2003)

It took me a while to figure out why this movie is so painfully boring, while very similar films such as AIRPLANE! and NAKED GUN are hilarious.
The whole point of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker brand of zany, off-the-wall humor is to confound audience expectations. This was easiest, of course, in AIRPLANE!, when most people went into the theater unfamiliar with Z-A-Z. However, even in the later NAKED GUN (and the POLICE SQUAD! TV series), when everyone knew what to expect, Z-A-Z set up certain expectations by making it a parody of cop shows and effectively establishing the "cop show" feel. The jokes naturally arise from the very familiar cop-show situations and turn those situations on their heads. In TOP SECRET!, by contrast, the idea seems to be to give the audience *precisely* what they are expecting--wacky jokes.
As a parody, the film fails utterly. Trying to "do" three different genres completely prevents them from establishing a specific genre feel which then leads naturally to the jokes. Instead, Z-A-Z just throw a bunch of jokes up on screen, because they know that's what the audience wants. And it simply doesn't work, because the jokes aren't *about* anything. It certainly doesn't help that they're also mostly unfunny and uninspired.
4/10.