Spies Like Us

This, the latest in a series of “we’re hip" comedies (earlier ones having included the likes of “Ghostbusters” and “Volunteers”), has a lot of talent behind it. I include the writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell, and the two stars Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Unfortunately, I cannot include the director John Landis. The only thing I would like to include Landis in is a prison ship bound for the Orient. He begins to offend me. Actually, he began offending me a while ago, most recently with “Into the Night,” and he continues to do so here. Let’s stop and consider for a minute just what a sleazeball Landis is. I mean, he started out promisingly enough; I liked “An American Werewolf in London” and who didn't like “Animal House?” I also liked “Trading Places,” but in thinking about it now, I seem to recall the beginnings then of the grotesque self-confidence (or, as one medical wag put it “self-confidence of unknown etiology”), the absolute conviction that whatever he does is funny, that he displays so rampantly now. I really think that once he began to achieve success in mainstream circles, he became so taken with himself and so inflated with the success of his loony ideas, that he has completely lost the offbeat perspective and low-key style which informed those earlier films. With each successive ratcheting of the grandiosity scale, he slips farther down the quality scale. His idea of what constitutes authentic humor seems totally misplaced. Example: “Blues Brothers.” I can hear Landis now, “OK let’s take every automobile manufactured in Detroit in the last year and crash it! That’ll be FUNNY!” Another example: “Into the Night;” “Let’s get 26 or so of my contemporaries (i.e. other directors) do little cameos in my movie! That'll be FUNNY!!” (Editor's note: and maybe in some bizarre way providing a kind of self-affirmation—“look, I'm so famous and successful now that I can get all these directors to come and do stupid meaningless cameos in my movie, and... I'm so generous in my success that I'll let them do it, let them have that moment of glory which they all secretly crave, but which only I have the power to give them.”) Sheesh.

What really bothers me about Landis is his utter willingness to use people (or ideas) for his own rather unimpressive purposes. He uses directors in “Into the Night.” In “Spies” he even uses Bob Hope. What I cannot understand is why people keep allowing themselves to be used. Doesn’t anyone ever say. to John, “No, that’s a stupid, cheap, degrading idea and I’m not going to do it”? What’s he got everybody?? Landis is an exploiter, in the worst sense of the word. I really think where he would excel is in pornography, which is an exploitative medium by definition. He could probably make excellent pornography; he is technically proficient and is clearly capable of the necessary exploitation. (Note: this should by no means be construed as a blanket condemnation of pornography. Perhaps we’ll discuss pornography in some later column.) At least in the pornographic arena he wouldn't have to labor under the pretense of mainstream acceptability (which is probably why “Animal House” and “American Werewolf” were good—they didn’t labor under that pretense). He also is self-indulgent enough to take a personal interest in bringing his fantasies to life on screen, though of course he may have a poor fantasy life, or perhaps lack the sensibilities to create something erotic, in which case we'd be in trouble.

The point is, this exploitative impulse annoys me, and it does so again in “Spies Like Us,” in which Landis exploits nuclear paranoia for his own cheap purposes. Now, I am not one to shy away from poking fun at controversial subjects. But I do expect that when somebody does take on the challenges of making something awful funny (meaning making fun of something awful, not making something awfully funny) that they do it with a modicum of wit or style (at least) and even better if they do it to serve some sort of moral perspective. Examples of the former: the Bond films; example of the latter: “Strangelove” of course; example of neither: “Spies Like Us.” In this picture, when Landis sends mega missiles hurtling towards the U.S. about to push us over the brink into holocaust, with psychotic generals watching in delight the carrying out of their own version of the ultimate solution, there is something dreadfully unfunny about it. You sit there in a sort of leaden stupor, because it's not funny, we all know how it is going to end (the heroes execute some ludicrously simple solution to save the day) and we cannot see any particularly good reason why we have been brought to this point, except that Landis said, “Wow, let's get power-mad generals to push us to the brink of nuclear holocaust; that'll be FUNNY!” Maybe he just has no sense of humor.

The idea for the film was originally a good one: a spoof of superspy adventures, but the inherent humor in that notion has been subsumed into the non-comedy of the plot resolution. In a successful parody, it is not only the plot which has to be a parody, but the conventions of the genre, the details and characteristics which make the object of the parody so readily parody-able. (Although ironically, in this picture, the only thing not parodied is the plot. That is to say, the plot outcome—saving the world from destruction—is exactly what the actual superspies do. Maybe that’s a large part of the problem with it here.) Landis does not do that here; it’s as if he couldn’t be bothered. He picks and chooses what he wants; when he wants to parody the conventions, he does, and when he wants to use the conventions to advance his empty headed plot, he does that too. Now that’s exploitation. (God, I just had a horrible thought--did Landis actually think he was making a powerful anti-nuke satire here??? Nahhh... it couldn’t be... could it?) On top of everything else, he actually repeats his dumb directors-doing-cameos thing here, though on a smaller scale. What a loser. All that having been said, I have to admit that I did laugh during this picture (just because a picture fails as a whole doesn't mean it can't have odd moments of humor), mainly due to the efforts of the two stars. I’ll repeat that I think Chase and Aykroyd are funny and talented, and here they do have occasion to use their skills, though also on occasion they are forced to submit to absurd slapstick for no apparent reason.

Chase has a standout moment when he raises the art of political doublespeak and nonspeak to new heights. To paraphrase that old joke, just because a picture is horrible, doesn't mean it’s bad. Unfortunately, the efforts of the two stars are not enough to compensate for the film’s inadequacies. What’s more, the film is well-shot and nicely photographed (I said that Landis is technically proficient), and the misuse of all that quality footage (not to mention film stock) in the service of this dismaying project just adds insult to injury (as does the use of two extremely attractive women in small supporting roles). I actually should have known that trouble was afoot when the ads for the picture bore an unfortunate resemblance to the ads for the failed Robin Williams/Walter Matthau picture “Survivors” (which got bad reviews too). God, don’t you publicity guys check stuff like that? It’s one thing to emulate the ads of a successful picture, but emulating those of a failure strikes me as sort of dumb. No matter.

Add to all of this the title track by Paul McCartney (he gets used, too), which isn’t very good, but may yet sell a lot of records (it’s already getting airplay), and I walked out of the theater feeling—not happy and cheerful as one might expect had I seen a good comedy—but depressed and annoyed, and even… yes… a little offended, as if I’d been ripped off. It occurs to me that it may occur to you that many of the criticisms I have leveled at the director might more properly be leveled at the writers (the aforementioned, and even praised, Ganz and Mandell) who, after all, wrote the script. To some extent that may be valid. Yet in a medium which I ardently believe to be a director’s medium, it is really the director, not the writer, who provided the thrust, the emphasis, and the perspective of the picture. If Landis wants to impose his own misguided sensibilities on this picture, there was really very little to stop him. Until proven otherwise, I will continue to believe that the script for this picture was much better than the final product. Whether a good director can elevate a poor script is debatable, but there is no question that a bad director can trash a good script, and I think that is what Landis did here. Too bad.