4 Page 14 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, July 10, 1984 'Top Secret' should go undercover By Byron L. Bull W HEN AIRPLANE opened three summers ago, there was no mistaking it for anything but pure, free spirited going for broke nonsense. There was something appealing about its cheap, crudely-put-together struc- ture, with its merciless shower of visual gags and puns. Unsophisticated, but refreshingly so, like a fine old MAD magazine parody. Top Secret, the follow up project by that films writing/directing team of David Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, is nothing but a disappointing retread. Just as Airplane spoofed the disaster genre, Top Secret tackles both World War Two adventures (The Guns of Navarone, Great Escape) and all of those awful Elvis Presley musicals. It does so by dropping an American fifties styled rock singer named Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) into an East German con- spiracy to destroy the NATO fleet with a secret weapon. The film's big joke is that though this is set in the present, the country is still being run by the Nazi's who are as ruthless as ever. Where there are Nazi's, there must he a Frensh resistance, even if this isn't France and there's no war. Nick falls into their ranks (whose memhers have names like Deja Vu and Escargot, that sound appropriate enough in thick French accents) and in love with a beautiful young Hillary (Lucy Gut- teridge). From there the story follows the cast through the stock ingredients, with a style that's meant to be absurb but more frequently is sophomoric silliness. The Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker style is to bombard the audience with one gag after another so relentlessly that one forgives the actual absence of any wit. The results is a lot like a Mel Brook's movie mercifully free of Mel Brooks and his schtick. The trick worked on Airplane because there were enough good one liners to stretch laughs through the lapses. Here, the giggles I I I Ian McNeice and Omar Sharif are two members of the French underground resistance in Top Secret, the disappointing new movie from the creator's of Airplane. are further apart, and not funny enough damage, killing the momentum it so really going on. The cameo appearan- to stretch through the dull parts. This is badly needs. ces, unlike those wonderful performan- Airplane at one third speed. To add a bit a ribaldry, there are a ces by Robert Stack and Leslie Nielson Some of the jokes work. The song and number of teen minded bits of cheap who mocked their own typecasting in dance parodies are ingenius, and shots. These range from a cow perfor- Airplane, are all wrong in tone. Omar Kilmer's impersonations of Presley's ming felatio through a jack hammer Sharif and Peter Cushing are on screen body gyrations are hilarious. An un- sieved and vibrator, to a giant park only as slapstick fodder, and look un- derwater fistfight, and a stunt involving statue of a pigeon that is despoiled by a comfortable about it. a volatile Pinto, are also gems, but flock of extras. Maybe, under a sole guiding hand, they're too infrequent. Too much of the The cast lacks any charisma, which the film might have found the right attempted humor is based on bad ver- doesn't help things any. Val Kilmer has angle. But with four writers and three bal and visual puns, that get so predic- nothing to offer other than his Presley body directors tugging at this film, it ends up table you can spot them as they're gestures. He shows no sense of timing, a listless committee decision. Top being set up. The plugged in joke style and lacks the self conscious good humor Secret is a project compromised and of comedy does this film the most that indicates he's aware of what's calculated to death. 6 'Greenwich isn't papal (Continued-from Pagel1) allows Roberts to go crazy with overac- ting. In his most emotional scene, in which he gets his thumb cut off by mob- sters, Roberts delives a two-minute sequence of eye-rolling and anguished grimaces, the likes of which have never been seen on a screen. Here, as in many other instances, Rosenberg should have exercised a little control over the actor. The actors are faced with the major problem that the characters are written devoid of any redeeming qualities - invarying degrees, they are just a couple of greasy, stupid jerks. It is impossible to believe that Charlie, who supposedly is the smarter of the two, would agree to rob a safe with Paulie. Roberts' Paulie is un- speakably stupid. He is not a little dizzy or slow-witted, but a larcenous, self- pitying imbecile, just this side of brain. damage. Thus the crucial element of the plot is a heist which could never logically oc- cur, staged by two friends who could never reasonably be expected to be friends. Vincent Patrick's script keeps shooting itself in the foot, keeping the film stuck in mediocrity. Charlie is given one opportunity to establish him- self as a human being in a scene on a rooftop with his young son. The scene could have been developed into something touching, giving the charac- ter a certain complexity. Instead, Patrick brings Paulie barging into it, demolishing it spectacularly. The film's next-to-last scene, in which Charlie confronts Bedbug Eddie, the mobster whom he has ripped off, is similarly bungled. Charlie tells Eddie that he hasa tape which could send him to prison for years. He wants to strike a bargain. The tension is built expertly by Rosenberg. Eddie will either accept Charlie's terms or hack him to pieces. Paulie brings Eddie a cup of coffee laced with lye. The scene is demolished, the film's denouement destroyed, for no reason. A lot of buzzwords are being thrown around regarding the theme of The Pope Of Greenwich Village - "male bonding" and "tribal loyalties," for example. Ultimately, however, the film seems to be saying that "ethnicity is destiny." Charlie dreams of opening a country inn, but he might as well be dreaming of opening a boutique on Mars. Charlie fits into Paulie's observation on racehorses - he can't make himself better than he was born. He is stuck in Little Italy, doomed to being what Italians in this film are; borderline criminals with vulgar wardrobes and mean dispositions. This theme is arrived at by a process of subtraction, after the film's comic possibilities have been killed off by the deficiencies of the script, or by Rosen- berg's direction. The lack of comic relief, and of any serious content makes The Pope Of Greenwich Village a very somber af- fair. After almost two hours of wat- ching the protagonists bungle around like rats in a maze, one leaves the film feeling emotionally drained, and having learned nothing. 764-0558 0 4 s