- "How silly can you get?" wonders American music sensation Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) in one of his signature pop tunes. How about a movie that lampoons Elvis, WWII films, The Beach Boys, and The Blue Lagoon? That's pretty silly, and that's exactly what the memorably zany Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker collaboration Top Secret! delivers. The plot, such as it is, follows Rivers on tour through East Germany, where he quickly stumbles upon a nefarious Nazi scheme involving a kidnapped scientist (Michael Gough), whose beautiful daughter Hillary (Lucy Gutteridge) is wanted by the authorities. Naturally, Nick and Hillary fall in love and meet up with the French Resistance which, just as naturally, is being run by Hillary's former lover (Christopher Villiers). As Rivers puts it, "I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground."
- While the film's villains are a bit boring even by cartoonish Nazi standards, the French Resistance is a hilarious collection of cliches. In particular, Omar Sharif generates a lot of laughs as a much-abused secret agent while the rest of the group spends most of its time engaging in stereotypical window-smashing, grenade smothering, cannon firing macho behaviors. Admittedly, the comedy is amplified considerably by the fact that the resistance is populated by people with names like Deja Vu (Jim Carter) and Chocolate Mousse (Eddie Tagoe). In fact, the film gets a lot of mileage from relatively simple riffs on language, with plenty of bad German, absurd Latin, and backwards Swedish (courtesy of Peter Cushing!) getting thrown around. But lest you imagine that these forms of humor are too highbrow, the film also offers humans pooping on pigeon statues and a case of bovine attraction that goes horribly wrong for two men sharing the film's famous cow costume. Something for everyone!
- So where does Top Secret! land in a ranking of the great film comedies? Well, here I think the film's broad aim actually serves as somewhat of a disadvantage. Whereas the same team generated what are inarguably the best disaster movie and cop show spoofs with Airplane! and The Naked Gun, this film is decidedly tougher to pigeonhole. As a result, I think people tend to forget that Top Secret! is every bit as funny and creative as those other two and certainly much better than anything this group produced post-1990. The film also serves as a startling reminder that Val Kilmer was once a remarkably talented comedic actor. Although the rest of the cast is mostly forgettable (Lucy Gutteridge's remarkable resemblance to Ingrid Bergman aside), Kilmer's singing, dancing, and all-around hamminess help propel the film through gags that might have grown stale in the wrong hands. It's a shame that Kilmer's comedy career has suffered a substantial downturn of late, but maybe some things are better left unsaid. Like "sometimes when you blow your nose into a tissue and you put it in your purse..."
- This was Val Kilmer's first film.
- "I know a little German. He's sitting over there."
