Here’s a film from Jim Abrahams, the non-Zucker third of the comedy trio that brought us Airplane! As that pedigree would imply, this movie is filled to the brim with pop-culture references, sight gags and overblown dialogue, all specifically designed to poke fun at the intended target. In this case, it’s Top Gun.
Our hero is a brash pilot with daddy issues, his rival is a dickwad with a personal grudge against the hero and the love interest works on the air base in a non-combatant role. Our hero starts out as the most awesome guy in the world until a buddy of his dies (Who saw that coming?! [/sarcasm]), which prompts our hero to mope until he becomes awesome again and gets the girl. All it needs is a send-up of the volleyball scene and it’d be complete (Seriously, Abrahams, was that just too easy or something?).
I wasn’t expecting Hot Shots! to be this specific in going after a particular movie, since spoof movies generally prefer to go after a broader genre instead. Then again, this is Top Gun, a film so cliched and formulaic it was practically designed to be cribbed from. Its fingerprints can be seen in every film ever made by Jerry Bruckheimer and all his many imitators. I’d daresay that even with no prior knowledge of Top Gun, any moviegoer with half a brain would recognize the story beats this movie is poking fun of.
If the movie has one flaw, it’s that it has no plot. None, nada, zilch. There’s a small subplot that has something to do with sabotaging planes and crooked military contractors, but the movie pretty much entirely revolves around a mission that is never explained in any detail whatsoever. We don’t know where the characters are flying, who they’re fighting against or why. Even in Top Gun, we knew that the characters were in a flight academy and the climax was a mission… Oh, who the hell am I kidding? That movie had no plot and tried to cover up the fact. Hot Shots! has no plot and wears that fact like a crown. Parody.
But with an absence of plot comes an absence of rules. This is the greatest strength and the most crippling weakness of Hot Shots! There was a distinct plot in Airplane!, thus it was comparably very strategic in which jokes to use and when. Here, it’s like Abrahams and co-writer Pat Proft were literally shoe-horning in every joke and sight gag they could, logic and restraint be damned. As a result, there’s an extremely uneven quality to the humor. Some jokes run too long (the barracks scene early on where the pilots sort out their family issues), some too short (they could’ve gotten more laughs out of Bogey) and some just right (the fight at the climax). Some jokes are sharply focused (any joke involving “Dead Meat”), some aren’t (what was the point of the Superman scene?) and some are just “WTF?” (the sex/grilling scene and the Chihuahua running gag).
Yet through all the hit-and-miss humor, there’s one point that sticks in my head: It’s easy to kill off a main character, but making it funny is near-impossible. And Hot Shots! does it repeatedly. That’s gotta be worth something.
More than anything else, I’m left wondering if I picked up the wrong movie. The movie was funny enough, make no mistake, but it’s Part Deux that I keep hearing about. I’ll have to pick that one up sometime and see if it’s any better. To be clear, there’s nothing that’s necessarily wrong with this one, it’s just too unfocused and inconsistent for my liking is all.