May 24, 1996

I’m not saying this as a complaint, this is not why I didn’t like the movie, but I was kinda surprised to watch SPY HARD thirty years later and find out that it was not in any way a parody of DIE HARD. I mean obviously it’s a spoof of spy movies, and also a few action movies, and also a few random other things pulled out of a box with a blindfold. But the only thing Inoticed that made me think of DIE HARD was a shot of plummeting much like the death of Hans Grueber. But this isn’t the villain at the end, it’s the hero’s lady in a prologue.

You all remember how it went down. Leslie Nielsen was a veteran actor going back to the ‘50s, then the Zucker Brothers put him in AIRPLANE! and found out how fun it was to see him acting serious about ridiculous things. So they made him the star of their tv show Police Squad!, which moved to the big screen as NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD!, which then got two sequels, and now many of us mainly knew Nielsen as a comedy guy. So then directors unaffiliated with Zucker-Abrams proceeded to use him in less successful (both artistically and financially) spoofs, and they either weren’t nearly as good at this style of comedy or just got to the party too late and we were already sick of this type of shit. In the case of SPY HARD I’d say it was both.

Nielsen stars as secret agent Dick Steele, aka WD-40. You see it’s funny because his name is penis-related and also, separately, because his number is not just a random number, it is in fact the number assigned to a popular brand of lubricant used for squeaky hinges and what not. Anyway his partner Victoria Dahl (Stephanie Romanov, Models Inc.) fell off a cliff before he blew up the terrorist General Rancor (Andy Griffith, A FACE IN THE CROWD). But 15 years later Rancor resurfaces, now with detachable robot arms, and kidnaps Victoria’s lookalike daughter Barbara. Do you get it, because “Barbara Dahl” = “Barbie doll,” which is a popular doll product.

Steele teams up with Agent 3.14 Veronique Ukrinsky (Nicollette Sheridan, THE SURE THING) and goes to save Barbara from an industrial laboratory type place where she’s strapped to a bomb. I mean who gives a shit what the story is, it’s just to string together little jokes and skits. Nielsen is still very dedicated to playing it straight, so you can generally see the vague shapes of comedy, and I guess a decent amount of mildly amusing jokes. Like at the beginning Rancor is torturing a guy who “doesn’t want to talk” and then they march him out and we see he’s a mime.

“And when you shoot him, use the silencer!” Rancor says with delight.

I kinda liked that line. It’s one of the better jokes in the movie. The actual best part is the opening credits, featuring “Weird Al” Yankovic singing the theme song he wrote, a soundalike of Tom Jones’ “Thunderball.” He appears on screen, so they get the benefit of both his song and his acting – I particularly like when he turns and sees his own credit and then turns back to the camera and smirks with pride.

Unfortunately even this sequence has a very low point when one of the “jokes” is that after some sexy female silhouettes swim by like a typical 007 sequence they have some fat ones. And one of them farts and bubbles come out of her ass. Somebody had to animate that, as their job, to provide food and shelter for their family. I’m sure whoever did the shot of Al’s head exploding from holding the note too long felt better about themself. Yankovic is credited as “Second Unit Director For Title Sequence,” but I’m going to assume that means he oversaw the shoot of his lip sync footage and not that he came up with “what if a fat lady farts.”

I guess come to think of it it would be hard to be James Bond and John McClane. You’re either there on purpose or you’re not. They do fit in a scene based on SPEED, when Steele and Ukrinsky take a bus that gets its brakes cut. I don’t understand why the villain (Tyler Patton, who would later be on-set dresser and “Engine Room Crew Member #3” in SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL) is a punk, or why it’s him that makes the “pop quiz, hot shot” speech. I do understand why they thought it was funny to have Ray Charles as the bus driver. Because blind people can’t drive. Ray Charles is a blind person. But he’s driving.

There are two other scenes based on specific ‘90s action movies. They felt the need to use the phrase “in the line of fire” going into the flashback of Steele’s days in the Secret Service, but I don’t think they say anything about “true lies” before the horse vs. motorcycle hotel chase. I suppose it’s impressive that they did some horse stunts (stunt coordinator: Fred Waugh, LAST ACTION HERO) and I do like the joke that the Harrier has a Marines recruiting ad hanging from it. But I don’t even like TRUE LIES and the original scene was already funnier than the remake.

A more generic action trope joke is the RAMBO/COMMANDO style suiting up montage (I would say putting on an American flag lapel pin is the highlight). And then they re-enact scenes from movies not of the same genre. There’s a love flashback based on the BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID bicycle scene. They briefly switch to Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace to do the Jack Rabbit Slim’s dance scene from PULP FICTION. DENNIS THE MENACE (1993) himself, Mason Gamble, plays a Kevin-in-HOME-ALONE facsimile named McCluckey. Also Steele does a SISTER ACT, disguises himself as a nun and leads the chorus in singing “Shout.” And there’s a JURASSIC PARK part with a puppet dinosaur. You know, these are some of the various movies that exist, and you may recognize that they are being alluded to, and that’s why it’s funny. You get it.

Also they have a collection of cameos of pop culture figures whose presence is supposed to be automatically funny: Mr. T is the first person you see, Fabio appears, Eddie Deezen gets spit on, Downtown Julie Brown sells cigarettes, Hulk Hogan wrestles a thug and then tags in Dr. Joyce Brothers. Also there’s Roger Clinton, Pat Morita (dubbed), Curtis Armstrong. Tone Loc is a gangster. Not in the same category, but Marcia Gay Harden plays a sexy lady at the agency. It was pretty early in her career, but she’d already been in MILLER’S CROSSING, which from what I remember was quite a bit better than this. Haven’t seen it in a while though.

SPY HARD is directed by Rick Friedberg (Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” video, “Brother For Sale” segment from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s OUR FIRST VIDEO), who directed Nielsen in LESLIE NIELSEN’S BAD GOLF MADE EASIER and BAD GOLF MY WAY videos, and showed him the SPY HARD script by his college student son Jason. The story is credited to the younger Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer (their first credit) and the screenplay is credited to those two & Rick Friedberg & Dick Chudnow (who also did the movies PRAY TV and OFF THE WALL together).

I was intrigued by the “Allegations of studio interference” section of the film’s Wikipedia page. Turns out the senior Friedberg fought with Disney about casting and who the movie was aimed at (they felt it should be for everybody, but he fought for the artistic purity of aiming it at teenage boys). He says they “cut all of the good dialogue and all the story.” They hired someone else (?) to do reshoots, edited it without him and cut it from 96 minutes to 77. As an outsider I will guess that perhaps the longer version made more sense, but also I’m glad to have not had to watch it for as long.

I could’ve skipped this one, but I thought its type of movie would make for a pretty good 1996 time capsule. Maybe that was a bad instinct, because spoofs are never exactly on the cutting edge of culture when they come out.The ‘90s references are, like, he receives a threatening tape in a Blockbuster Video case, or Rancor laughs that he will “play Mortal Kombat with the entire world.” I don’t think that’s an in-joke but I should note that cinematographer John R. Leonetti shot MORTAL KOMBAT the previous year and directed MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION soon after.

In the interest of putting positivity into the world I will mention a couple more things I kind of liked. I smiled and/or chuckled when The Director (Charles Durning, DICK TRACY) wants to brief them with a video and they struggle for a second with getting the VCR on the right channel and mode for it to play. I like when Steele is remembering Victoria and looks at a photo of her, and it’s a still of her falling off the cliff. I like Robert Guillaume as a straight man, that was a good choice. I like that in the end credits version of the theme song Yankovic adds some lines like “Allow me to reiterate, the name of this movie was SPY HARD.”

And I believe I actually laughed out loud at this use of the famous Team Disney building:

I suppose you could say SPY HARD is a pretty big hit, having made almost five times its budget in theaters. The Friedberg & Seltzer duo became prolific unproduced writers, allegedly doing an uncredited rewrite of MAXIMUM RISK. Comedy golf video nepo-baby privilege strikes again. Their next big break was getting credited on SCARY MOVIE only because they’d sold Dimension their own SCREAM parody called SCREAM IF YOU KNOW WHAT I DID LAST HALLOWEEN and a WGA arbitration went their way. Then they became a directing and writing team whose body of work consists of: DATE MOVIE, EPIC MOVIE, MEET THE SPARTANS, DISASTER MOVIE, VAMPIRES SUCK, THE STARVING GAMES, BEST NIGHT EVER and SUPERFAST!. I know this is meaningless but I just want to mention that the combined (not average) Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of those eight movies is 16%. I have not seen them and will definitely keep it that way unless I back myself into a corner with some future summer movie retrospective. Wish me luck.

Summer of ’96 connections:

1. At the beginning Steele listens to a recording of Alex Trebek briefing him on arms dealer General Derwood Rancor in a Jeopardy format. The tape self destructs, possibly killing helicopter pilot Mr. T. I’m sure they knew they were opening against MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE when they put that in, and I’m also sure they wished they could’ve known to have a scene with Leslie Nielsen hanging from wires. Can you imagine the clumsy bungling that could’ve occurred?
2. A random cow silhouette that flies by during the opening credits is, I suspect, a reference to TWISTER showing the flying cow in the trailer. But it could also be a coincidence.