Spy Hard (1996)

That was an excellent one.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

RELEASED IN 1996 and directed by Rick Friedberg, "Spy Hard" is a spoof of James Bond flicks with Leslie Nielsen as Agent WD-40 and Nicollette Sheridan as Agent 3.14. Stephanie Romanov plays a dual role while Marcia Gay Harden is on hand as the agent's dubious secretary. Andy Griffith plays the main heavy. The first 15 minutes are hilarious, but from there the movie settles down into quietly amusing. The tone is akin to The Naked Gun franchise with its silly humor. The movie coulda done better on the female front, but Sheridan is likable and Harden has a couple worthy scenes. Additional movies are spoofed, like "Pulp Fiction." Overall, it's a throwaway comedy, but it has its goofy charm. THE FILM RUNS 81 minutes and was shot in Los Angeles and Burbank. WRITERS: Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer, Dick Chudnow & Friedberg. GRADE: B

You always know with a Leslie Nielsen slapstick comedy, you'll be in titters. Here, is no exception. This comedy should be called, Spy dumb, as that's what Leslie Nielsen is here, another bumbling character, this time a spy. Having your code name named after a world wide silicon spray, doesn't give you much of a chance. The plot is Spy Dumb too. Bad Guy Andy Griffith, looking twice as ugly, yes, as if almost unrecognizable (he fooled me) needs a particular computer chip to put his dastardly deed, of sending a dangerous missile into space, so he control the world. Agent WD40 (Nielsen being Nielsen) teams up with smoking hot KGB agent, Veronique Ukrinsky (Sheridan, looking much different, beautox, and all) to rescue her father, the designer of the chip where he and his associates are being held hostage in Griffith's secret hideaway. Sheridan's not the only hot one in it, Nielsen, again a ladies man. Watch for a cameo from a Baywatch babe, bed sharing with Nielsen. The movie takes jabs or spoofs at some 94 flicks, while we almost have an unmistakable and moving Loaded Weapon moment. Even an old Michael Jackson incident can't evade this funny flick. I will admit the Speed take off, got all too ridiculous by it's near end, but this is a slapstick comedy, remember, which instigates continual laughter as only our bumbling idiot (who in public, you should avoid at all costs, to your health) delivers. Durning's cloak disguise's got all too ridiculous, to a point, some of them were really stupid. There are a lot of really good and inventively comedy moments. Griffith was really good, but the performance that really had me was that of Barry Bostwick as a warring agency colleague of Nielsen's. The opening theme and lyrics, ala: Bond films, with swimming silhouettes in the b.g. is much a funny start, positively ensuring what follows is gonna be just as funny and it is, yet not as funny as Nielsen's Naked Guns. Hats off here to Weird Al Yankovic, for that cute little opening track/swimming sequence performed by Weird Al "Like A Surgeon" Yankovic. There's quite a few cameos, some I didn't recognize.

"Spy Hard" can easily be misconceived as a film by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team who brought us "Airplane" (1980), "The Naked Gun" (1988), and its sequels. Their signature gags-per-minute style of on-screen jokes is very evident here, not to mention Leslie Nielsen's starring role and a cameo by "Weird Al" Yankovic. However, this film is mainly missing what Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker usually include in their previous films: laughs.Actually, there are a few funny moments, but the rest of the movie seems to try too hard to be funny. The films references to popular, but non-spy, movies from that era (approximately 1992-1996) also feel out of place most of the time, and contribute nothing to the story. Leslie Nielsen still brings his trademark deadpan sensibilities to the role of special agent Dick Steele, but the rest of the film is weighed down by gags that are way too obvious, character names that serve as an all too desperate attempt to fish laughs from the audience (Dick Steele being a great example, and yes, there are penis jokes associated with that name), and missed opportunities.When I say missed opportunities, I'm talking mainly about Andy Griffith's role as terrorist General Rancor. To me, it's funny that American's quintessential nice guy would play the villain in this movie. However, that irony is never capitalized upon at any point when Griffith is on the screen. Because his character had his arms blown off, there are dumb running gags about his mechanical prosthetics. There's also a scene where he says, "No Dick can stop me", which seems too open an invitation for a phallic joke. Sure enough, that joke arrives unfashionably early.The equally dumb names continue with the many femme fatales, beginning with Dick Steele's previous partner in crime, agent Barbara Dahl (Barbie Doll. Ho ho ho!). The worst was Miss Cheevus, played by Marcia Gay Harden years before winning an Academy Award.There's nothing really wrong with the story. A federal agent tries to stop a madman terrorist from taking over the world. I can get behind that. I mean, this terrorist wants to take over the world, but doesn't seem to know what he's going to do with it afterwards. Well, neither do terrorists in more serious-toned films.The problem lay in the story being weighed down by way too many movie references, none of which had to do with the plot or with spy films in general. For instance, there are ironically no references to "GoldenEye" (1995), the James Bond film that came out months before. There are, however, famous scenes repeated from "Cliffhanger" (1993), "Pulp Fiction" (1994), "Home Alone" (1990), "Apollo 13" (1995), "Speed" (1994), and the famous Paul Newman bike-riding scene from "Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid" (1968). The latter reference came out of left field and broke the pattern.Still, with the exception of Ray Charles as a bus driver during the "Speed" spoof, all the other parody scenes were not funny. They were also barely parodies because they didn't point out the irony of their respective iconic moments. Leslie Nielsen and Nicollette Sheridan dance the exact same way John Travolta and Uma Thurman did in "Pulp Fiction", and to the exact same song. But that was it. It's almost as if the filmmakers' thought, "Hey, 'Pulp Fiction' was popular a few years ago. Let's throw in this scene from it." I could rant about Nielsen's agent number being WD-40, and how just having the name of a waterproof spray does not a funny gag make. Still, it at least tried to make fun of spy movies, which is what a film called "SPY Hard" should be doing.The fault here lies in the writing, particularly contributions by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. If these names sound familiar, they belong to two writers who would go on to ruin the credibility of "Scary Movie", which they helped co-write, by making "Date Movie" (2006), "Epic Movie" (2007), "Meet The Spartans", "Disaster Movie" (both 2008), and "Vampires Suck" (2010). Those latter films ruined the parody genre, and are even more guilty of pop culture referencing without actual humor than this movie is. Their contributions to this movie probably resulted in it being worse than it could have been.Fortunately, of the many cameos, "Weird Al" Yankovic made the most of his appearance. His song, "Spy Hard", was an incredibly funny send-up of James Bond themes from Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" to Tom Jones' "Thunderball", both lyrically and visually. It's just too bad that the rest of the film couldn't keep up, as hard as it may have spied.

Often this movie just really feels like they gave Leslie Nielsen a rough outline of the plot and yelled "action". Nielsen is the usual Frank Drebin stereotype, but his deadpan delivery routine only works when the line's actually funny. That's rarely the case. The writers try to copy "Naked Gun", but can never really get it right and get stuck in their own dialogues. Here and there they manage to show some creativity, but for the most part they just resort to lame obvious jokes you see coming from miles away. You can feel them struggling, and that's never good. Even more bothersome than the amount of groan-inducing jokes is the boredom though. This movie has very few interesting things going on. Only some funny loose parodies like the ones on "Home Alone" and "Sister Act" made me keep watching. It's not the worst parody there is, it's not completely void of laughs, but it's still barely worth the rental fee.