Hot Shots!

Directed by Jim Abrahams, Hot Shots! follows Charlie Sheen’s Sean “Topper” Harley as he finds himself caught up in an adventure involving many wacky figures and episodes. Filmmaker Abrahams, armed with his and Pat Proft’s screenplay, delivers a persistently irreverent (and uneven) comedy that benefits from the agreeable efforts of its various performers, as the actors’ compelling, go-for-broke efforts ultimately go a long way towards smoothing over the picture’s frequent bumps and lulls – with Sheen’s terrific work as the clueless protagonist matched by top-notch periphery players like Jon Cryer, Cary Elwes, and Kevin Dunn. (Lloyd Bridges, cast as Topper’s oddball superior officer, offers up an often hilarious turn that remains a continuing highlight within the hit-and-miss proceedings.) It’s clear, then, that Hot Shots!‘s inability to become a classic spoof film along the lines of Airplane! or The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! stems from its continuing reliance on dated pop-culture references and gags, as much of this stuff, including spoofs of movies like Dances with Wolves and 9½ Weeks, feels very much a product of its time and is, as a result, hardly able to generate the knee-slapping laughs for which Abrahams is clearly striving. By the time the larger-than-life finale rolls around, Hot Shots! has cemented its place as a perpetually erratic endeavor that rarely, if ever, becomes the hysterical comedy one might’ve anticipated.

**1/2 out of ****