Hot Shots!

It starts with a flyboy roasting franks in the exhaust of a combat jet and never lets up, giddily puncturing all those wartime flying hero movies and throwing in a heap of movie parodies besides. Either way, the pacing is jetstreamed and the level of inventiveness is sky-high. [31 July 1991, p.25]

Hot Shots! offers a satisfying kick in the pants to a movie (and an era) that has more than earned it. Read full review

Charlie Sheen brings just the right exaggerated seriousness to his ace pilot's role, and Cary Elwes perfectly captures the ingenue arrogance of Topper's handsome rival. Jon Cryer, as a pilot with major eyesight problems, also displays expert deadpan timing, especially when he delivers the film's most uproarious line. Read full review

WHEN you go to see a film by those wild and crazy filmmakers who brought you Airplane!, Police Squad!, The Naked Gun and The Naked Gun 2, you pretty much know what you're going to get: puns visual and spoken, sight gags and pratfalls, parodies of other films and mockery of film conventions. It's just a question of how well they do it this time, and in Hot Shots!, which opens today in theatres across Canada, the answer is: not bad, not bad at all. The plot is the usual silly trifle, but the actors are good and the production is slick.[31 July 1991]

Hot Shots! is packed with enough sight gags and slapstick to keep an audience grinning even when some of the jokes fall flat. This isn't as funny as "Airplane!" but it's not a bad try...Hot Shots! isn't the sort of movie that will set you thinking, but for mindless, summer entertainment it fills the bill nicely. [6 Aug 1991, p.4D]

If anyone steals the air-show with his deadpan, it's Lloyd Bridges as Admiral (Tug) Benson, a total maladroit whose body has been wounded in every major battle since the Little Big Horn massacre and who has flown 21 missions without ever landing his airplane (he was shot down every time). Bridges gets away with some wonderfully corny lines and sight gags. [31 July 1991, p.E1]

Hot Shots! is very sharp and very funny, and if it doesn't have the aggressive, anarchic edge of "Airplane!" (attitude seems to be the specialty of David Zucker, who has just released "The Naked Gun 2 1/2 "), it is consistently, almost exhaustingly hilarious. Read full review

Funny as it is for a great deal of its length, Hot Shots! does, however, have its share of dull spots, and watching it inevitably makes one yearn for the good old days of "Airplane!" Read full review

The only trouble with all these parodies is that Hot Shots begins to seem chaotic rather than clever. Too many of the send-ups turn out to be unnecessary detours. [31 July 1991, p.E5]

Shots is intermittently funny - but never, even on its own terms, important. [31 July 1991, p.6D]

Hot Shots is consistently funny, but it produces more guffaws than laughs. Its jokes read better than they play on screen. It's not The Naked Gun, though considerably better than The Naked Gun 2 It suffers a bit from its underdeveloped plot: a bunch of greedy industrialists want Harley's squadron to crash and burn so they can sell the Navy a new, super-expensive warplane model. [2 Aug 1991, p.6]

While the slapstick comedy antics are frequently amusing and, on rare occasions, even hilarious, HOT SHOTS!, like so many other cinematic parodies before it, tends to lose sight--or control--of the plot, such as it is, in favor of more jokes, more visual gags and more dialogue puns--all hurled at the audience at a rapid-fire pace. Read full review

Hot Shots isn't quite that bad, but given the material -- the military mind is certainly, in military parlance, a target-rich environment -- it ought to be funnier. [31 July 1991, p.D1]

The movie's nowhere near the inspired funniness of its predecessors. But it often displays the same spirit. It's strung end to end with sight gags. Some fall flat on their faces. But, by sheer weight of numbers, many of them work. It depends on your ability to lower yourself into -- or steer stoically clear of -- the idiocy pit. Read full review

Unfortunately, the film begins to fall apart when it leaves film parody and strays too close to reality. This film is so timely, it has the young pilots flying a bombing run on Saddam Hussein's nuclear plant. Either these filmmakers were lucky, or they made it last week. It almost seems as if the latter is true, because Hot Shots handling of Middle Eastern bad guys is just a little too heavy handed -- no, make that insulting and insensitive. Read full review

Given that this is the first whacky comedy to come out of the Gulf War it’s a shame the whole enterprise isn’t a lot more tasteless, but the half-funny goings-on give that the script has been tailored not to offend a military machine on the point of massive war, perhaps at the expense of unpatriotic laughs. That said, it’s a pleasant enough time-waster, and doesn’t drag on too long. Read full review

Jim Abrahams tries to tap the zany Airplane! vein with this Top Gun spoof but bats far too low a percentage with the usual rapid-fire assault of numbingly stupid gags. Read full review

The main difference between Naked Gun 2 1/2 and Hot Shots! is that almost half the jokes in Naked Gun 2 1/2 were at least slightly funny while in Hot Shots! less than a fifth are any good at all. [2 Aug 1991, p.C5] Read full review