Police Academy: Mission to Moscow (1994)

The seventh and final entry in the Police Academy franchise arrives in Moscow with the enthusiasm of a tour group that has already missed its flight. Commandant Lassard and his veterans are summoned by a Russian commandant to catch Konstantine Konali, a mafia boss laundering money through a computer game that disables any security system on which it has been played. The plot is a clothesline for sound effects, and Michael Winslow delivers them. Christopher Lee and Ron Perlman appear, presumably for the catering. The film received a token release in the United States and Canada, grossing a sum that would embarrass a regional car dealership, which tells us the culture had already moved on.

On representation, the ensemble is a monument to a vanished demographic: white men in uniform, plus one female officer, Captain Callahan, who exists to be the female officer. That is the film's entire engagement with gender. No character carries a heritage, a body, a diagnosis, or a romantic orientation the screenplay considers worth a line of dialogue. A mafia boss launders money, and the film treats organized crime as a scheduling problem, not as evidence of a system. The Russian setting supplies snow, a ballet, and a joke about the currency. It supplies no history, and the film has no interest in revising any.

There is no sermon here. No climate anxiety. No gentle instruction on how to treat each other. The movie wants to show us a man making motorcycle noises with his mouth, and it succeeds. We classify such artifacts without malice. A 1994 comedy that never stops to explain the world to its audience is, in its own limited way, a period piece. The period is unclear. The score is low. We move on.