Movie Review – Hot Shots!
Principal Cast : Charlie Sheen, Carey Elwes, Valeria Golino, Lloyd Bridges, Kevin Dunn, Jon Cryer, William O’Leary, Kristy Swanson, Efrem Zimbalist, Bill Irwin, Ryan Styles, Hedi Swedberg, Rino Thunder, Don Lake, Cylk Cozart.
Synopsis: A parody of Top Gun in which a talented but unstable fighter pilot must overcome the ghosts of his father and save a mission sabotaged by greedy weapons manufacturers.
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When one thinks of dynamic Hollywood partnerships in the comedy sphere, one usually comes up with a list of on-screen talent like The Marx Brothers, or Abbott & Costello. Rarely, if ever, do you spot a list that included behind-the-camera talent as a productive force, so it might make sense that despite having a litany of successful comedy films under their belts, the writing/producing team of Jim Abrams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker weren’t exactly a household name. The popular Naked Gun films, spoof entries like Airplane and Top Secret!, for example, have since become a mainstay of cult 70’s and 80’s classics from the US region, playing up to the bonkers, off-the-wall non-sequitur gags coming thick and fast style of comedy the trio was known for. In the early 90’s, Jim Abrahams went solo with a near pitch-perfect spoof of the Tom Cruise action classic Top Gun, a militaristic parody with an exceptional joke-per-minute ratio that, for the most part, absolutely strikes the perfect balance.
Hot Shots! stars Charlie Sheen as Topper Harley, a talented but troubled fighter pilot who is recruited for a top-secret mission by Admiral Benson (Lloyd Bridges), a hilariously inept commanding officer. The film follows Topper as he struggles with his past and his feelings for psychiatrist Ramada Thompson (Valeria Golino), all while competing against his arrogant rival, Kent Gregory (Cary Elwes). With slapstick humour and outrageous gags, Hot Shots! sends up military machismo and action movie tropes, featuring supporting roles from Jon Cryer as the visually impaired Wash Out and Kevin Dunn as the bumbling Lieutenant Commander Block.
The wit of the absurd is writ large in Hot Shots!, a film that acutely pierces the cheesy testosterone-porn of Tony Scott’s now classic 80’s actioner that sees Sheen replicate the uber-cool Cruise character of Maverick, Carey Elwes do a spot-on asshole douche turn as the Val Kilmer character, and Lloyd Bridges absolutely out-act everyone else he shares the screen with as the bumbling Rear Admiral with several metallic body parts. The film follows a very loose similarity to the basic Top Gun elements, and as you should expect from these kinds of parody films the plot is almost an inconvenience to the sheer onslaught of verbal and visual sight gags, most of which you’ll miss the first time around because you’re loudly guffawing at the hilarity of what Abrahams and a very game Charlie Sheen put on the screen. Abrahams, who also wrote the film alongside fellow comedic scribe Pat Proft (Wrongfully Accused, Mr Magoo), is restricted by a significantly lower budget than Tony Scott had with Top Gun, having to settle for a number of model shots, archival footage and well-executed trick photography to sell the illusion of having access to not only a whole aircraft carrier (they did not, from all reports) but a fleet of Navy fighter jets. In all honesty… he pulls it off!
Hot Shots! is also uniquely cool in that it pairs both Sheen and Jon Cryer together for the first time, the pair having a long-running career later in the sitcom Two And A Half Men, and unlike the sitcom (which I hated), Cryer is up to the task of portraying the walleyed “Washout” Pfaffenbach, a fellow fighter pilot alongside Topper. Kevin Dunn plays things fairly straight as another Navy commander, while William O’Leary, Kristy Swanson and Bill Irwin have fun, if small, supporting roles. Longtime American comic actor Ryan Stiles has an extended role as a pilot alongside Topper’s father, in an extended opening sequence. As you might expect in an Abrahams’ directed film, there are a number of cameos from the early 90’s – Charles Barkley shows up ever-so-briefly – and references to relatively recent “serious” films, including (but not limited to) Superman: The Movie, Dances With Wolves, and The Fabulous Baker Boys, almost all of which land particularly well. The only problem with this kind of referential comedy is that it ages poorly in some respect, in that viewers over a certain age will likely not understand the gags unless they’ve watched a lot of older films (Gone With The Wind comes in for a brief lampooning as well) or even the one upon which this film is based. For me, however, because I’ve grown up with a lot of the films Hot Shots! references, I get it. I laughed – a lot.
Another part of the film I thought really worked well was the dialogue. All the actors do solid pratfalls and sight gags, but there’s an understated delivery of some of the funniest lines I’ve heard in a modern parody film in many a year, a far cry from the dreck of the Not Another [fill in the gap] Movie knockoffs we got in the 2000’s. Abrahams and Proft’s screenplay is riddled with sly jabs at language, turns of phrase, witty one-liners and irony, and a lot of gleeful (of perhaps not quite politically correct) racial, sexual and political interplay. When you think something funny has happened on the screen, make sure you keep an ear out for some of the very funny dialogue as well; arguably the film’s MVP is Lloyd Bridges, his take on the imbecilic military commander is supremely amusing, although he’s not alone as Sheen, an actor who knows how to poke fun at himself, also mocks and plays up his leading-man actor persona as the more surly, less cheesy Tom Cruise-lite performer. Sheen understands the kind of film he’s in, and isn’t afraid of making himself look a complete fool for a laugh. Hell, everyone in Hot Shots! makes a play for some manner of cringeworthy gag, but because there’s so many laughs coming so often, any that do land with a thud are quickly brushed aside.
If I had any real issue with the film in a retrospective manner, it’s poor Valeria Golino, playing Ramada. She’s supposed to be an analogous Kelly McGillis trope, a smart, beautiful, sexy romantic interest for the Charlie Sheen character, but Golino’s cumbersome delivery just doesn’t work alongside the slick, razor-sharp delivery of her ensemble. Golino certainly looks the part, but she feels like she isn’t in the same movie here as everone else, and at times looks lost or befuddled by what she’s being asked to do. Sheen, with whom she shares a lot of screen time, accommodates her deficit with strong comedic timing of his own, and saves a lot of scenes from being dead-weight, so it’s a shame that I found Ms Golino to be the weakest aspect of what is an otherwise hilarious and on-point film.
Hot Shots! is peak American comedy from the late 80’s, early 90’s. It plays on the well-trod Abrahams/Zucker motifs of throwing every bizarre, kooky, nonsensical, edge-of-your-seat gag at the screen as you possible can, as fast as possible, and absolutely hits it out of the park. Not every joke lands, and not everything makes a ton of sense, but more often than not you’ll be howling with at least minor chuckles and a knowing smile with some of Charlie Sheen’s finest comedic work, Lloyd Bridges stealing every scene with perfect deadpan delivery (how did nobody ever think to put Bridges and Leslie Nielsen in a film series together?), and an absolutely classic parody of Top Gun that serves as a perfect antidote to Tom Cruise’s megawatt smile. A legitimately funny, classic comedy.
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