Top Secret!

This is the least well-known of the madcap satirical comedies of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), and by all counts the weirdest. But the richness of its ideas makes it my favorite. The plot combines the rock musical with the spy thriller (not to mention assorted other genres), and the comic invention is fairly constant. Read full review

This movie will cheerfully go for a laugh wherever one is even remotely likely to be found. It has political jokes and boob jokes, dog poop jokes, and ballet jokes. It makes fun of two completely different Hollywood genres: the spy movie and the Elvis Presley musical. Read full review

Jokes so stupid as to seem almost surreal, an amazing range of cultural referents and a smattering of genuinely witty conceits. Read full review

Top Secret! comes nowhere near ''Airplane!'' but in its own cheerful, low-pressure way, it's about as amiable an entertainment as you will find this summer. Read full review

The attempted target this time is a combination of the traditional spy film and Elvis Presley musical romps, which in and of itself is funny to start with. And Val Kilmer proves a perfect blend of staunch hero and hothouse heartthrob. Read full review

Top Secret! replaces the scattershot-parody approach with a more precise re-creation of the dopey simplicity of WWII romances and Elvis pictures. Read full review

Doesn't always work, nor does it measure up to their hilarious AIRPLANE!. It is, nevertheless, very funny as it lampoons two genres: the spy movie and the teenage musical. Read full review

A bunch of scattered laughs. [22 June 1984, p.5-12]

Like "Airplane!", the film is teeming with funny ideas. Unlike "Airplane!", the majority do not come off...Top Secret! is mildly amusing at best. [25 June 1984, p.69]

I suppose it's also less than inspired to portray a ballet company where the codpieces of the male dancers bulge out so far that the ballerina can cover the width of the stage using them as steppingstones. Nevertheless, some dumb, obvious gags have a way of working by impudently flaunting their dumbness and obviousness, and this appears to be a textbook example. In fact, for the juvenile public that should supply its best audience, Top Secret! may serve as a veritable primer of irresistibly terrible wheezes. Read full review

The first half chugs along quite happily, but whereas in Airplane the jokes could simply be strung on a hand-me-down storyline, here the demands of the plot start to play havoc with the levity. Signs of desperation have begun to creep in some time before the end. Read full review

The result is a monkeyshine that lumbers when it should swing. Read full review

This time, though, the creative group has neglected to build to the kind of giddy, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink climax that made Airplane! such a memorable exercise in anarchy. Top Secret! plays more like a pillow fight in a summer-camp cabin, an agreeable way to pass the time after lights-out, but one that just peters out when everyone gets tired of breaking the rules. Read full review

The writers have 13-year-old humor in their hearts and an overdose of late-night movies in their minds. But there was no snowballing of the humor; the jokes leave you tickled, but never build to a comic crescendo. [23 June 1984, p.D6]

Kilmer is an improvement on Robert Hays of Airplane], but both gents perform with the facility you'd expect from a random sampling of Gentlemen's Quarterly models; like any svelte clotheshorse, Kilmer is good-looking yet self-effacing and he doesn't seem in the least perturbed that his wardrobe upstages him.[25 June 1984]