Top Secret! – Review

After Agent Cedric (Sharif) makes an escape from a moving train, after doing battle with a “tough” East German officer, it sets off a chain of events as the man is hunted. The wheels are in motion, but the tracks are not traditional. As these nazi-esque eastern Germans plot, they are holding a cultural festival and a replacement musician is needed for it. This event will also act as cover for their overlying plan, so someone appropriate is needed for attention.

Enter world-wide phenom superstar Nick Rivers (Kilmer). He is an American singer of top hits like “Skeet Surfin’” and Rivers is on top of his game. No one can resist his heavenly voice or charms. Nick is relatively oblivious to life other than his musician ways, so when he gets mixed up with an agent of an underground resistance movement, things get silly. Hillary Flammond (Gutteridge) intoxicates Nick, who helps her evade authorities and in turn is swept up into the mix as almost a spy himself.

Top Secret! is fairly hard to describe other than comedy, and mostly because it packs a lot into the short runtime spoof-wise. It’s not really ONE type of thing; it’s a bit of a musical-spy-war-50s-60s-70s goof fest. It spoofs a lot, and loses some story cohesion due to this fact. That being said, it remains pretty funny. If really dumb jokes combined with clever jabs, quips and visual gags is your thing, you could do way worse.

While it’s not quite as strong as a couple of the other spoof type movies of its era, it’s worth a run, and has some really funny moments. It is fairly harmless, though a bit of the references are quite dated at this point, and some are quite obscure.