(Note: Capsule version of the review is available here.)
These days, people have rather short attention span and hardly anything can satisfy them for the long run. 1970S nostalgia is already wearing off, and now, people are becoming more and more interested in 1980s. Few years in the future, early 1990s are going to be regarded as next Golden Age of nostalgia. However, I doubt that people are going to be very nostalgic about the Hollywood products of that period. One of the reason would surely be films like National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, that, in many ways, symbolise the biggest problem of contemporary American film industry - lack of originality and ideas.
Being made as some kind of parody on Lethal Weapon series, this film pairs two L.A. policemen - Jack Colt (played by Emilio Estevez), burn-out alcoholic cop on the edge, and Wes Luger (played by Samuel L. Jackson), by-the-book policeman, days away from retirement. Two of them, following the murder of Luger's ex- partner, must confront evil General Mortars (played by William Shatner), crime lord who is going to flood the market with cocaine stashed in Wilderness Girl cookies.
The authors of this films (whose director, Gene Quintano, worked on such projects like the third and fourth sequel of Police Academy) lacked any original idea before they undertook the projects, and that reflects in the lack plot, characters, and, even original lines. The plot, or what goes for the plot in this movie, is nothing more than a series of gags that make laugh of some popular films made in previous few years (apart from Lethal Weapon series, this film "borrows" its female lead image from Basic Instinct). The best gags, are, same as with many other similar movies, shown in the trailers. The rest simply doesn't work. Only those who used to watch a lot of Hollywood products in that period would laugh. Others would probably wince at the lameness of humour. Some would be entertained by celebrity cameos that pop up every once in a while. But, at the end, spending hourand half in front of this disorganised mess of a movie is simply not worth the effort.
P.S. The film was sometimes criticised for being the parody of aseries that already had strong comic overtones. The authors of Lethal Weapon returned the favour by using the Loaded Weapon 1 joke in their fourth sequel.
RATING: 2/10 (-)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on May 6th 1999)
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