![]() So we started to videotape spoofs of TV commercials, and scenes from Love Story. 'One day I ran into David Zucker, who was working in construction, and he said 'We have this video equipment, do you want to come and play around with it?' This would be in about 1970, when video was a real novelty. It was not until Jim Abrahams was in his late twenties that the Zucker boys became his friends. Quite a decent track record for a man who spent his first few years after college working contentedly for an insurance company in his home town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father ran a real estate company with a Mr Zucker, whose sons were just a little too young to be suitable playmates for Jim. Apart from the first Hot Shots], he also made a more conventional comedy, Big Business, with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, and the Winona Ryder vehicle Welcome Home, Roxy Charmichael he also continues to be involved in the writing and production of the Naked Gun movies. Part Deux] is the fourth movie Abrahams has directed since the ZAZ partnership diversified into solo projects. (What on earth could have prompted that gag?) There are certainly plenty of moments in Hot Shots: Part Deux] that merit sniffiness, not least the scene in which Lloyd Bridges, as a cerebrally challenged President of the United States, vomits copiously on his Japanese dinner companion. ![]() The Part Deux] subtitle is a low shot at the more po-faced critics who wheel out such adjectives as asinine, vulgar, sophomoric, cretinous or simply dumb whenever faced with reviewing these cheerfully shameless genre spoofs by Abrahams and / or his sometime collaborators the Zucker bothers, Jerry and David (as in The Naked Gun 2 1/2: Un film de David Zucker). Cut to wide shot of father and son leaping to the sides of their respective patrol boats and yelling in unison 'I loved you in Wall Street]' Surely you recognise the comic trademark? Correct: it's a scene from the latest offering of the Airplane / Naked Gun school - Hot Shots: Part Deux], directed by Jim Abrahams. Cut to close-up on Martin Sheen, sweaty and tense in combat gear, musing about his ever-narrowing proximity to the demented Colonel Kurtz. You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).CLOSE-UP on Charlie Sheen, tense and sweaty in combat gear, musing about hell being the impossibility of reason. None of this is to say that Hot Shots! Part Deux is an overall better movie than Top Gun: Maverick, but if the inevitable third Top Gun movie includes a few poultry-based death scenes, at least it will keep things fresh. But by contrast, Top Gun: Maverick continued the original's trend of battling a nameless, faceless enemy bereft of any real-world significance, a fantasy-based strategy that, back in the '80s at least, served to help the military to attract scores of new recruits. Hot Shots! Part Deux also told a story full of political specificity, which unfortunately manifested in cringey Gulf War-era jingoism and rampant Islamophobia. Why? Because according to director Joseph Kosinski, he "didn't want every storyline to always be looking backwards." Which is a weird thing to say about a movie that opens with a Kenny Loggins banger cranked to 11. ![]() Meanwhile, Top Gun: Maverick, to its detriment, completely omitted the character of Val, played by Kelly McGills.
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