Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach (1988)

Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach arrives as the fifth entry in a franchise that had, by 1988, settled into a comfortable groove of slapstick and diminishing returns. Commandant Lassard travels to a police convention to collect a lifetime achievement award, accidentally walks off with a bag of stolen diamonds, and is kidnapped by jewel thieves who mistake his obliviousness for poise. The plot is a clothesline for gags, and the gags are pitched at the preschool level, as contemporary reviewers noted without much affection.

The ensemble remains the series' chief asset and its chief liability. Bubba Smith, Michael Winslow, and Marion Ramsey return, lending the proceedings a diversity that was simply the established furniture of the franchise, never a statement. Lt. Callahan and Officer Stratton exist chiefly to be ogled, and the film's gender politics belong squarely to the Reagan-era locker room. There is no subtext here, no cause, no lesson. Officer Conklin's size fuels a running physical gag. The Everglades airboat finale is spectacle without agenda. The villains want diamonds, not a reckoning with capital.

This is a picture with no interest in instructing anyone. It wants to knock a man off a chair and watch him land in a drum kit, and it pursues that goal with something close to devotion. It opened at number one, earned a healthy worldwide gross, and was met by critics with a unanimity of disdain rarely achieved in any art form. Rotten Tomatoes logged a zero. Siskel gave it zero stars. The audience, polled at the exits, shrugged and offered a B. There is an odd honor in a film so thoroughly uninterested in bettering its viewers. Nothing is taught. Nothing is preached. A man falls into a drum set, and the parade marches on.