Review of Spy Hard (1996) by Jesse O — 05 Jan 2016

You know you have problems when the funniest part of your film is the title sequence and song by 'Weird' Al Yankovic that parodies the James Bond title sequences. And I don't mean that in a derogatory manner, because the song is actually funny, but you know what that means for the rest of the film.

Just take Frank Drebin from the Naked Gun series and stick him in the spy world and this is the movie you get. To say that this is a rip-off would be a severe understatement. I'm surprised the Zuckers and Jim Abrahams didn't lawyer up and sue, because they do legitimately steal several jokes from The Naked Gun trilogy.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me when this film was written, in part by, by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who are better known as being the writing/directing team for abominations such as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, among many, many others.

This movie is, really, only marginally better than some of those movies, but it's still an absolutely terrible movie. It only gets the one star based on the Weird Al song and Leslie Nielsen managing to make me laugh during some scenes.

Here's the thing, though, as much as I love Leslie Nielsen, the fact is that without the Zuckers and Jim Abrahams, Nielsen isn't that great. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a solid enough actor, but the Zuckers and Abrahams knew how to write for him and his character to where they'd get the most out of Nielsen as far as comedic performance is concerned.

The problem with these other Nielsen movies that came out in the 90s that were hoping to recapture the Naked Gun's success is that they tried to do so without what made the Naked Gun so good in the first place.

They were trying to re-do all of the goofy slapstick and silly dialogue without any of the wit, energy and effort actually put in. Again, Friedberg and Seltzer, along with two others, rip off the goofier aspects and it's just not that funny.

It's as lazily written as some of Friedberg's and Seltzer's worst, but it's never, to me, as offensively awful as Date Movie was. At least it's 80 minutes long, so the suffering never lasts that long.

Again there's a couple of laughs sprinkled here and there, but they're never that consistent and for every joke that works, mildly at that, there are a thousand that don't. That's not a good ratio.

Not recommended in the slightest, not even if you love Leslie Nielsen and want to see more of him being a Frank Drebin-esque dumbass. Terrible movie.