Directed by: Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker
Starring: Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Peter Cushing, Christopher Villiers, Jim Carter, Michael Gough, Eddie Tagoe, Omar Sharif
Top Secret! is written and directed by the same trio that made Airplane! and Police Squad! (notice the exclamation points on the end of each of these titles). They employ a comic method of mining each scene for humorous or outrageous possibilities. They love to hurl verbal and sight gags at you to the point where you start instinctively ducking. Most work, some don't, and that's the nature of ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker) comedy.
Top Secret! is immersed in silliness from the get-go. It spoofs spy movies and Elvis Presley musicals. Nick Rivers (Kilmer) is a teen idol playing a concert in East Germany who stumbles across a government plot to destroy something or other. In a movie like this, it doesn't much matter. Nick meets Hillary (Gutteridge), whose father is being held in prison. Nick falls for her and joins "the resistance" to foil the plot, which is led by Hillary's childhood boyfriend from when they were stranded on a desert island (in a lampoon of The Blue Lagoon).
The musical numbers are performed by Kilmer himself, and these are the least funny of the sequences. But there are plenty of laughs, including two men dressed as a cow wearing boots trying to infiltrate a prison, a horse that sings A Hard Day's Night, and a man throwing himself on a grenade which explodes only on the men surrounding it. I even liked Omar Sharif's cameo where his spy character winds up trapped in a compacted automobile.
Kilmer, like many of the actors in ZAZ movies, play the material straight and don't hint that they know they're in a spoof. Well, there is one scene in which two characters acknowledge that they are in a "bad movie", but Top Secret! is not in that category.
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