Spies Like Us (1985)

John Landis assembled two of the era's most bankable comedians, pointed them at the Soviet Union, and let them bumble toward a missile silo. Spies Like Us is a Road to... picture with the charm sanded off, a Cold War farce in which Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd play expendable decoys for a covert operation that deceives Congress out of stealth bomber money. The film's instincts are those of a 1940s Bob Hope vehicle, and Hope himself turns up to confirm the lineage. Nothing here is arguing a position. It is arguing for a laugh, and losing.

The cultural ledger is remarkably bare. There is no LGBTQ material, no body politics, no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent reading, no reimagining of actual history. The cast is white to a man save Bernie Casey in a minor turn, which is simply how 1985 cast a studio comedy. Donna Dixon's Boyer survives the mission and handles herself capably, though the script never bothers to make a case of it. The closest thing to a thesis arrives in the final minutes, when the heroes deflect the missile and become nuclear disarmament negotiators, a beat played for a gag about Risk and Trivial Pursuit. A faint anti-nuclear sentiment, delivered as a punchline, does not a sermon make. The film's one recurring political joke concerns the mujahideen, whom the Americans hail as allies moments before the cut to their own execution. It lands as a gag about misplaced confidence, not as commentary on empire.

The only genuine streak of insubordination is aimed at the military brass, who scheme to let thermonuclear war proceed so as to preserve a way of life, and who are duly arrested by Army Rangers. That is light anti-establishment farce, the kind Hollywood has produced since the Hayes Code, and it carries no economic argument. For a film this loud and this expensive, the ideological footprint is nearly invisible. We classify it accordingly, with the fatigue of a sommelier presented a warm can of beer.