Spies Like Us

Good Landis work looks like a comically heightened reality, and it scores with sharp moments in which the world is ridiculous and being American is possibly just as ridiculous. Spies Like Us, his latest, ranks with his poorest efforts, in which strange people start out in extraordinary situations and the lead characters have a pig-out; pushing for wildness, Landis gets mired in crudity (as in Animal House). [09 Dec 1985]

There are seeds of something funny in the film's beginning and in its premise, but they are soon dissipated by so little sustained wit, and so much scenery. Read full review

Spies is not very amusing. Though Chase and Aykroyd provide moments, the overall script thinly takes on eccentric espionage and nuclear madness, with nothing new to add. Read full review

Spies Like Us does have a few yuks, or at least yukettes, but there's only a semi-smidgeon of inventiveness in this ponderous farce. [16 Dec 1985, p.84]

Landis' direction is indulgent, to say the least, with big landscapes, big crashes, big hardware, and big gags filling the screen. What he forgets is character development, that all-important factor that must exist for comedy to work well. Read full review

Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire. Read full review

Sadly, the script is so patchy that most of the genuine laughs are squeezed into the first half; the rest is a rather tacky and confused extended joke about the nuclear arms race, which is tasteless only because it fails to be funny.

It's the kind of stuff you come up with when you're not trying very hard, and on Spies Like Us, nobody seems to be trying. And that can be very trying indeed. [09 Dec 1985, p.C3]