Top Secret! (1984)

Top Secret! arrives from 1984 with a suitcase full of targets and no interest in anything beyond the next gag. The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, working with Martyn Burke, sends up Elvis musicals, Cold War spy pictures, and the black-and-white French Resistance films that once filled afternoon television. Val Kilmer, in his debut, plays an American rock singer who stumbles into an East German resistance plot and helps rescue a scientist from a naval mine scheme. The machinery is absurd and the jokes arrive at a rate that suggests panic. What the film does not contain is any discernible social program. There is nothing here to instruct us, correct us, or improve us.

The cast is white to a degree that requires no defense and receives none. Omar Sharif and Eddie Tagoe appear in supporting turns, and the film never remarks on their presence, because the film remarks on nothing except sight gags. Lucy Gutteridge's Hillary Flammond belongs to the resistance and occasionally pulls Nick out of danger, which grants her a flicker of initiative. She remains, however, the object of a romantic contest and a woman to be carried off, first by a traitor and then by the hero. Her agency is a byproduct of plot mechanics, not a statement.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. The villains are East German Communists and the American rock star is the hero, so whatever economic critique might be imagined runs the other way. There is no environmental sermon, no meditation on the body, no neurology, no revisionist reading of the historical record. The film's only ideology is the punchline. We are left with a ninety-minute machine for laughter, which is either a limitation or a small mercy, depending on the hour.