Hot Shots! (1991)
The mother of all movies!
Comedy night! Get your rose tinted glasses out of their keepsake bag, tonight we are gonna drop back a bit in time to one of those comedies whose sole existence is really to make fun of other movies. and all the tropes and stereotypes in them, while fitting in that sort of thing itself. You might argue if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all - and honestly you probably aren’t really wrong - but we have fun being redundant anyways! It was right around when such wonderful flicks like Top Gun were all the rage, but don’t call it Shirley -tonight we sit back in our takeoff positions for Hot Shots!
The movie is effectively a giant riff on Top Gun, so you can expect many same-same plot points. We’ve got the hot headed main character, a good pilot who doesn’t follow orders living in the shadow of a disgraced dad who was also a pilot. You have a top secret mission with a hidden underbelly of sabotage. You have love, you have slapstick, and you have the end goal of taking out the bad guys and their nuclear power plant while coming out alive. Is it possible? With this doofus cadre of flight sticks who knows!
The movie is a comedy at heart and most it’s body, but there is a surprising amount of room for character to develop in it regardless. Yes, it’s all overly exaggerated and played up for laughs, but that’s generally the shtick when riffing on other things. Our main character gets to try and cope with his issues - but instead of necessarily resolving them, they get flipped around to make a bad situation suddenly a good situation that solves the problem because the cause isn’t bad anymore. You’ve got the little three way romance that develops, plays out, and then sort of just resolves itself because one guy is like “nah, that other guy is cool now I’m totally okay with you loving him not me” and the likes. Look, it’s an older movie, it’s not the finest most nuanced and tactically modern sensitive movie - but if you wanted to dig into it the character moments are there briefly now and then. You’ll be far better off just looking at each character for the cartoon laugh track element that they are - that guy can’t see, that guy’s an idiot, that dude there is so obviously going to die they literally named him dead meat.
Most folks, I don’t think anyways, are really going into a comedy for the sole intent of character building and touching moments - most people go in for laughs. The actors play as much a part in delivering the humor as any of the actual writing involved. You can have the best joke on paper, but a crap delivery is going to hurt how it lands, but the best actor still won’t make the lamest joke gold. The actors do a pretty good job here with their roles, delivering a very hammed up and Airplane style performance. It’s overblown and goofy as all heck, and the actors don’t break the entire movie from their given characters while you watch them go. Some, like Dead Meat, get played a lot straighter than others even if it is still blown up in quite a few parts - which also helps to sell some of the more outrageous actor moments and keep you from feeling things are getting just too goofy.
Watch you head!
Humor is of course a very subjective thing, and not everyone will find the same stuff funny. Give me a fart joke, I’ll laugh for ten minutes. Give a more refined person a fart joke, and they will probably just be disgusted or something, you know? We’ve got a very large mix of stuff here - and I’m sure most could find at least some things to laugh about if the entire movie isn’t really their style. Slapstick is abound and rather universal in it’s humor potential, but you’ll also get a bunch out of it if you know the stuff it’s spoofing for added effect. Some of it is a literal sort of pun - like being so hot you can cook food off of you - and some of it is in the naming conventions like with Washout and Dead Meat. It might be something like adjusting the mirrors on your plane, or a plane pulling up next to other planes and bonking their “heads” with it’s wings like some sort of judo chop. It won’t all land for everyone, and some the running gags might be lost on you - like people constantly accidentally sitting on a chihuahua - but the only folks who I don’t think will find any enjoyment out of at least some leg of humor here is the ones that are way too serious about their movie intake - this is an exceptionally silly movie, and that’s one of it’s main comedic points is to show hos silly movies are, and that makes it fun if you can enjoy that with your mind set.
Now you also probably see that this thing is an action comedy - so you expect some stuff, like action. There is some, with plenty of jet stock footage getting used for a lot of the more “official” flying stuff. We also get a lot of different effects, like model planes, stretch arms, crashes and carnage. Again, it’s all played up for laughs, so you can expect a crash that’s not incredibly accurate or realistic, but it does still happen. Probably some of the fanciest looking bits are the ending explosion and the cartoon electrocution that happens - but it’s all done pretty well. Don’t get me wrong, you aren’t going to be convinced someone’s arms are really stretching while holding onto a plane wing that’s tearing off or anything like that, but again - cartoony comedy. Either way, everything looks pretty good and the costumes are well on point for some bonus points. Yes, it’s a lot of that modern (for then) pilot and navy attire, but it’s at least not just totally normal everyday street clothes.
Audio is well balanced and lines are easily heard. My projector had a little bit of an act up on me with the audio a few times, but that’s more a fight between Hulu and my projector than it is the movie’s fault. Soundtrack is there and rather much what you would expect, and following that line what you expect from me is the normal line of “It’s all gone after the credits” to which it is. There was some nice jazzy style numbers and things that (once again) help riff on the movie type it’s riffing on though, so the sound does a good job there. It also helps in a gag or two beyond just line delivery. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows of course, as with any movie not everything ages the best. I’m not the kind of person to get easily offended by things, but that doesn’t stop me from being able to see where folks might take some issues with representation of peoples and the likes - so perhaps some folks are going to be a bit more uppity about a few scenes or jokes than I am. Sadly, no real fart jokes in there - so if I had to call it out for soime thing I’d go with that.
In this economy?
To be totally honest, I think I’d rather watch Part Deux! than the first one, but that’s more because of the topic of it riffing. I was never really a Top Gun person, so the second movie just hits home better for me with all the puns and jokes and references. If you are more of a Top Gun person you’d probably get a bunch out of this and how it’s poking fun at the various elements of it in a well-natured way. Even if folks aren’t in on all the injokes, it does still offer a stupid comedy with plenty of slapstick and easily identifiable jokes regardless, so if folks can contain their brains for the movie runtime they most likely should find some enjoyment. I had a good time coming back to this one regardless of if it’s a movie for everyone or not, so I think the trailer should do a good job of telling a person if they would enjoy this thing at feature length.