Review of Spies Like Us (1985) by Stefan G — 12 Nov 2015

I was hoping this would be somewhat decent, but it turns out the director is only occasionally good at what he does. Spies Like Us is a case of the director and the cast resting on the laurels of their previous successes and assuming that the same approach will consistently work again and again, but the problem here is that the film seems horribly rushed.

It was made in the same time as Rocky IV, during a time where everybody thought Russia was the big bad wolf. Sure enough, much of the clichés of the Cold War are prevalent here, where they're taken into comedic context, except for the fact that the jokes don't work at all, either because they're outdated or because they simply weren't funny.

That in itself seems somewhat odd when you consider that many of the people involved have done a good job in previous films. For example, Dan Aykroyd was amazing in Trading Places and Ghostbusters, but somehow he can't make it work in this film.

Am I the only one who thinks that's slightly odd? The story is a completely stupid concept. It revolves around sending two incompetent boobs as proxies just because the military didn't want to send talented officers.

That should be a funny plot, but it's not very believable, and the film does a very poor job at hiding this. As for the acting, there's quite a lot of overacting, and it's painfully apparent that nobody who was involved had any enthusiasm for the film at all.

On the whole, it seems as though the film-makers were cutting corners everywhere, even when it comes to the look of the film. This was made in 1985, and yet it looks as though they used the cameras they used for National Lampoon's Animal House.

Perhaps that is rather fitting, considering that this is clearly one of those films that nobody wanted, and yet somebody decided that it still had to be made. Either way, Spies Like Us was simply awful, both as a comedy film and as a star vehicle.