If there was a film that single-handedly won the Cold War, it was Top Gun, celebration of American military and technologically superiority presented by Hollywood at the top of its creative powers. After Cold War became subject of history books, it was safe for Hollywood to treat that film as an object of parody. This opportunity was taken by Jim Abrachams with his 1991 film Hot Shots!.
Protagonist of the film, played by Charlie Sheen, is Lt. Sean “Topper” Harley, former US Navy aviator who left the service, plagued by the memories of disgraced father and former pilot who had one of his pilots killed. He now lives among Native Americans, but Lt. Commander Block (played by Kevin Dunn) asks him to return to service in order to participate in Operation Sleepy Weasel, top secret mission against Iraqi nuclear arms factory. Topper agrees, but upon return to base has to deal with rival aviator Lt. Kent Gregory (played by Cary Elwes). He also meets and falls in love with Ramada Thompson (played by Valeria Golino), psychiatrist who wants to ground him over his past traumas. In the meantime, Block actually tries to sabotage planes under his command in order to win lucrative contracts for his partners from defence industry, which would provide more expensive replacements.
Director Jim Abrachams is a former member ZAZ – trio that included brothers Jerry and David Zucker and created Airplane!, one of the best Hollywood parodies of all times. As a solo director, Abrachams at first tried his hand in broader and more generic forms of comedy. Hot Shots! represents his return to Airplane! formula – irreverent, silly and surreal humour presented under rapid tempo of saturation comedy. Unlike many such films in later years, most of jokes and gags work. Abrachams and his co-writer Pat Proft keep most of the parody focus on Top Gun, but they also build on such jokes. Good example is running gag including Topper’s ill-fated partner Lt. Pete “Dead Meat” Thompson (played by William O’Leary), which is obviously inspired by similar character played by Anthony Edwards in Top Gun; the gag can serve both as parody of Top Gun but also of many other war film cliches. However, Abrachams and Proft, despite short running time, lacked inspiration to fill entire film with jokes related to Top Gun. They were instead trying to scavenge many other big hits released in previous couple of years, like 9 ½ Weeks, Fabulous Baker Boys and Dances With Wolves. Although this might make the film very dated and less comprehensible to younger audience today, those gags mostly work, although some of them are too repetitive and some, especially those at the expense of America’s Middle Eastern adversaries, might look out of bounds of “political correctness”. Cast is mostly good, especially Charlie Sheen who apparently had a wonderful time playing character that is supposed to be dead pan in comparison with silliness around him. Jon Cryer, who would later co-star with Sheen in Two and Half Men, is also good as visually impaired Lt. Jim “Wash Out” Pfaffenbach. Hot Shots received mostly positive reviews and was, more importantly, massive hit at the box office, resulting in sequel titled Hot Shots Part Deux two years later.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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