Spies Like Us

I loved this movie when I was a kid. With the money I made my parents spend renting this, we could've gone to Disneyland. At some point in the 80's, though, my demand for its re-rental died off. I remembered very little of it, aside from the goofy outfits on the poster and the "want some coffee?" moment after the G-force training. The last time I saw it, Reagan was President. And then it popped up as a recommendation on my smart TV's home page, and last night, my wife blurted out watching it. So we did. For the life of me, I don't know what kid me was thinking. Woof, what a stinker this was. I didn't laugh once. I don't even think I smirked. Spies Like Us feels less like a movie and more like a patchwork quilt of forgotten Abbott & Costello sketches, loosely threaded into a rejected Martin & Lewis script, and it feels like it with every creaking, hoary second of the movie's bloated hour and forty-five minute length. That's not to say trimming this down to a lean 90 or even 85 would've saved it; it just would've saved how long I was exposed to the painfully dated schtick here. It feels like all that Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd were told to do was be themselves; Chase's character the same smarmy, douchey, insufferable, bullshit artist he's played since leaving SNL fifty years ago, and Aykroyd is the same stumbling, affable, wordy, self-conscious everyman he's been since Ghostbusters. Except neither man was asked to be the straight man, rendering all the comedy inert. God bless 'em, both men are trying and throwing everything they got into it, but none of it lands. Hell, none of it gets off the ground, let alone trying to land. What's truly mystifying about this failure of a comedy is who it was directed by: John Landis. Before this, he had directed Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places. That is back to back to back certified comedy classics right there. I don't know if this was a paycheck movie for him, I don't know if he was more interested in the on-location stuff and just assumed putting Chase and Aykroyd together would result in some undeniable force of comedic nature that he didn't even need to get involved with ... I don't know what happened. All I know is whatever touch Landis had before this in capturing comedic gold was gone when shooting started here. The on-location stuff is gorgeous, don't get me wrong. Landis captures some beautiful shots. But I came to watch a comedy, not a nature documentary. Because Spies Like Us is so unfunny, all the other flaws in the movie that might be papered over with laughter are left to stand there exposed like the scene with the Russian woman in the snow. I could've overlooked the nutty, improbable plot, the forced romantic subplot with Chase and Donna Dixon, the sudden turn into megalomaniacal comic book supervillains by the military guys at the end, all of it could've been brushed under the rug if this was funny. But it isn't, so those other, smaller flaws are there glowing like a bar sign in the night. And because of all of this, every moment of the unnecessarily long run time of this movie creeps by agonizingly slow. This movie has no right to be approaching the length of a shorter James Bond movie. It doesn't have the plot or the humor to sustain it. Spies Like Us is one of many, many 80's movies that seemed to be made with the premise of "take comedic actor A, combine with comedic actor B, and the money will roll right in". Sometimes, it resulted in magic, like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. More often than not, though, it resulted in forgettable things like Dragnet, because quite often, these team-ups were executed with the mentality that simply having the two comedic actors on screen was enough, and often, it wasn't. It ignores the undeniable fact that a comedian can't be funny through sheer force of will. They need material. They need JOKES. Set-ups, punchlines, a straight man, and a fall guy. Spies Like Us is one of those forgettable movies that never tried any harder than pointing to its stars and thinking that's enough. It isn't.