Wop Bop a Loo Bop a Lop Bom Bom

After the success of Airplane!, the writing/directing team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (ZAZ) were suddenly in high demand. They had a winning formula, it was thought, and studios hoped the trio could bring the same creative parody ideas to new works, and not just a film based on an exact copy of another film (1957’s Zero Hour!). The team, in fact, did just that with Police Squad!, the 1982 television series starring Leslie Nielsen. That show was a massive success… if you ignore the fact that it was an utter bomb when it was released. And then the team tried again, with 1984’s Top Secret!... which also bombed. It would be a hard few years for the creative team before they finally saw success again.

There are two elements that made Airplane! work. The first was its wall-to-wall jokes. The film is absolutely packed with humor, from lines and jokes delivered by the cast, to sight gags, insane moments, and just about anything else you can think of. The film doesn’t stop layering joke after joke and if you somehow miss one because you’re laughing at a different joke already, well, then you just go back and watch the film again to catch everything that you missed. And, number two, is the fact that the film is based on an actual movie, Zero Hour!, which helps to give the movie structure and purpose. Yes, it’s a parody film packed full of humor, but it’s also still a real movie with a story and characters. Even as you’re laughing you’re still being taken through an actual plot. Working together, Airplane! comes out as a real, satisfying experience.

When the trio came around to make Police Squad!, they kept that structure, allowing for wall-to-wall jokes while still telling case-of-the-week stories. Audiences on TV might not have responded to it, because at the time the pacing of TV comedies was different, slower, with pauses for audiences to react while a laugh track told them what was funny. None of that was in Police Squad!, but that doesn’t stop it from being good. It just means people at the time didn’t know the brilliance of what they had.

The reason why Top Secret!, funny as it is, fails is because it doesn’t match that same formula. While there are plenty of jokes in the movie, and some of them hit really hard, the movie has no structure to it. Instead of a tight, cohesive story to hang the jokes on, the jokes themselves are the only thing actually pushing the story forward. Much of the movie exists to move the characters from one funny scene to the next, but there’s no connective tissue that actually makes you feel like you’re watching an actual adventure. It’s a pastiche of ideas, a series of skits, but without the tightness of the Zero Hour! parody to sell the material. It is closer in style and tone to The Kentucky Fried Movie than a real story, and that makes it hard to get invested in what’s going on.

The movie focuses on Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer), a rising pop star who is all the rage in America. When the East Germany government decides to hold an arts and culture festival (which is actually, secretly, a facade so that the East German military can launch some kind of military operation on West Germany to unite the two halves), Nick is tapped to join the festival. He just had his hit song, “Skeet Surfing” (about guns and beach parties), hit the top of the charts and, worldwide, he’s quite the man.

However, over dinner one night, he spots Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), a member of the resistance. He helps her out of a jam, and then helps her again the next night at the opera, stopping an attacker with a gun. As it turns out, that man Nick stopped was really an East German police officer, and Nick is sentenced to death. He manages to escape, and join with Hillary, and the two flee to her allies in the countryside. Together, with a crew of resistance fighters, and Hillary’s former lover, Nigel (Christopher Villiers), they might just have a chance to stop the military operation before it can even start… that is if a mole within their ranks doesn’t rat them out first.

The best part of Top Secret! is Val Kilmer. The Julliard-trained actor was known to go deep for his many roles, working with a vocal coach to find just the right accent to play Doc Holliday in Tombstone, and learning the entire Doors catalog to play frontman Jim Morrison in The Doors. Kilmer is great as Rivers, investing fully in the role and clearly having a blast while filming. It’s a silly part, in a silly movie, but Kilmer takes it all just seriously enough that everything around Rivers just works. Without an actor this good, and this dedicated to the film. Top Secret! would be a total bust.

Additionally, there are some amazing gags that show a level of care and planning that makes them stunningly great. There’s a section about halfway into the film where Nick and Hillary meet a secret informant for the resistance at a bookstore, and the whole sequence is shown in reverse, meaning the actors had to perform everything in reverse to make it all look right, and it works so well. There’s a great bit near when the resistance enters the German base, and they’re showing their plans in the dirt right outside the base, but as it goes on more and more elaborate models of the base are shown, making everything hilariously stupid. And then the climactic final fight between Nick and the informant takes place underwater, in a Western bar fight that is dumb, yes, but so elaborately crafted you have to love it.

Credit where it’s due, ZAZ understood the humor of escalation. Not every joke can benefit from being expanded and stretched out, but those sequences where the the directors hit that note properly (like the three listed above) illustrate how well it can work. Those moments are the ones I remember whenever this film comes up. It’s moments like these that sell the humor of the film and make it a comedy classic that so many people hold in high regard. Hell, Weird Al has said it’s one of his favorite movies of all time (much to the incredulity of Val Kilmer).

With that said, the movie doesn’t really work for solid stretches of its runtime. It spends a lot of time working to set up its threadbare plot, and then largely abandons it when it becomes inconvenient to the joke setups. The entire first third lacks the kind of zinging humor ZAZ is known for, and the film really takes a while to get going. And then, even when momentum builds, it often feels like the movie is wasting itself on cheap jokes and moments that land with a thud. The humor of the film is uneven, struggling to pack in nearly as many jokes as the trio’s previous works, all while moving at a much slower pace.

I would honestly say that if it weren’t for regular showings on cable over the decades since its release, no one would remember Top Secret! at all. It’s absolutely a lesser effort from the ZAZ team, lacking in both constant humor and solid story to make it a film people want to watch over and over again. It’s much better suited for a couch-surfing crowd, looking for something to entertain for a few minutes before they switch to something else. The sketch-style structure of the film makes it the perfect thing to switch to during the commercial breaks of another program, with the few solid moments absolutely working free of context or story.

On its own, Top Secret! is a bit of a dud. It’s a fun movie, in places, but not a good one. Without a regular audience of people catching bits and pieces of it while browsing their TVs, it’s a film that would have faded from memory, the kind of film that people would say, “do you remember that weird comedy that had, I think, Val Kilmer in it?” Cable saved this movie, and made it a film people remember fondly. I doubt a movie like this could find the audience for it now in this new streaming age. I’m glad it found its audience, so we can enjoy what works about this flawed, silly little film.