Throughout his lyrics to the theme song for Spy Hard, "Weird Al" Yankovic repeatedly tells us the film's title: the name of this movie is Spy Hard, the movie you're watching is called Spy Hard, the movie I'm singing about is called Spy Hard, and on and on.
As it turns out, it was good of him to remind us, because Spy Hard is so much a pale imitation of every other Leslie Nielson-as-bumbling-comedic-action/adventure hero (Airplane, Police Academy, Naked Gun, Naked Gun 2 1/2, Naked Gun 33 1/3) that it'd be easy for us to forget just what we were watching.
In this one, Nielson plays a James Bond type, agent WD40, who has retired from the organization because the woman he loved died and he felt responsible. He's lured back to the service when his nemesis, General Rancor (Andy Griffith), kidnaps WD40's late lover's daughter, Barbara Dahl (Stephanie Romanov) and offers her release in exchange for a microchip he needs to complete a rocket that will allow him to dominate the world.. Rancor wants revenge because a confrontation with WD40 15 years earlier cost him both arms.
It's a tired story, but then, everything about this film is tired: the dialogue, the sight-gags. How many times, for example, do we have to hear dialogue like the following before we stop laughing at the joke?
"Darling, there's something you and I should talk about before I go play golf."
"What is it?"
"It's a game in which people wear funny clothes and use a stick and a ball. Drinking is often involved."
Or:
"We've just had a disturbing message from our satellite listening post on Gibraltar."
"What is it?"
"It's this really big rock sitting off the coast of Spain."
The sort of exchange may have been funny in Airplane and even mildly so in Naked Gun, but it's not anymore. The engine that drives the humor is the unexpectedness, the absurdity of the non-sequitur. Here, however, everything is so telegraphed that the filmmakers should have listed Western Union as a creative consultant.
The movie abounds with similar unfunny bits. There are, for example, too many obvious jokes about Rancor's armlessness: Can I give you a hand? You wouldn't attack an unarmed man, would you?
There's the scene in which Charles Durning, playing WD40's chief, dons a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to see through clothes, and then turning his gaze on a hairy, heavyset male guard who is wearing underneath his uniform--surprise!--a black bra and panties.
There's the horse that Nielson rides in a chase scene, entering an elevator in a posh hotel. As two well-dressed and snooty passengers look on, the horse urinates on the floor.
Been there; done that--like, in the third grade.
Even the dozen or so gratuitous allusions to recent popular films fall flat. When Nielson gets onto a bus, you know the film will slip into a Speed bit, and when he later arrives at a convent that's a front for Rancor's gang , slips into a habit, and finds himself in a room where a choir of nuns is rehearsing, you know that he'll suddenly become Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, and the nuns will break out of their lifeless liturgical song and into some rocking number.
There is one funny moment in the film, however, one the preview audience greeted with a mild applause of appreciation. About at the halfway point, Rancor's henchmen arrive at a home in an affluent suburb where WD40 has hidden the scientist. There, they meet a Macaulay Culkinesque character named McLuckley (Mason Gamble), who attacks them, a la Home Alone, by dropping tools on them and swinging empty paint cans at their heads as they climb stairs to search for the scientist. The tools miss their mark, and the bad guys catch the paint cans and throw them back at the kid. Later, they drag him down the stairs by his feet, banging his head on each step as they go, saying, "And that's for Getting Even with Dad, and that's for My Girl, and that's for My Girl 2."
If Hollywood ever gives us Spy Hard 2, we can only hope the same fate gets visited on the perpetrators of this film.
by Joe Schuster
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