How Silly Can You Get!

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2009)

Lots of fun in this shambling parody of a dozen different genres, mainly those in which the good espionage agent is sent into enemy territory to rescue an imprisoned scientist, climb fortress walls, outwit the Gestapo, uncover a spy in the midst of the resistance movement, slaughter innumerable Germans, make love to a beautiful woman, and do Elvis impressions.
Some of the gags are pretty inventive. A giant telephone looms in the foreground of the shot and when it rings a man in the distance marches up to it and picks up -- a giant phone. A man falls off the wall of a fortress and does one of those carefully times head-over-heel flips that stunt people have perfected and when he hits the ground, he shatters because the figure is made of pottery.
Others come across as rather too extended. At least a minute is given over to a scene in a bookshop -- one take -- that's filmed backwards and has the dialog backwards as well. It's funny, but it must have taken a long time to get the whole thing right. Every backward movement must be timed perfectly. Eons, geological epochs must have come and gone during rehearsals. Dynasties rose and fell. And the novelty is worn off as soon as we get the joke, which is about ten seconds into the skit.
And one Elvis number would have been enough for me, but I had to sit through three -- I think. Maybe it was four.
Val Kilmer is very pretty but acts as if he can't act. Later, when he was over the top of that cinematic arc, he turned in a splendid performance in "Heat." He does, however, capture Elvis's kinesics very well. Not that they're at all suggestive. No, no. As The King himself put it, "I don't make no dirty body movements." Best male performance in a slightly-better-than-average comedy: Jeremy Kemp as the German General Streck. He's absolutely marvelous with that pocked face and thick neck and built-in sneer. His German accent is convincing too.
The object of the parody gets a little mixed up at times. The East Germans are all dressed like Nazis from World War II. And they act and speak accordingly. But of course East Germany at the time was under the domination of the Soviet Union and was dying from an excess of communism. Still, the Germans are always good when you need a villain. It seems that we've never been able to forgive them.