SPY HARD (10)

Directed by: Rick Friedberg

Starring: Leslie Nielsen, Nicollette Sheridan, Charles Durning

The Pitch: Leslie Nielsen as Secret Agent Dick Steele - a takeoff on James Bond. Allegedly.

Theo Sez: How does a film like this get made? It's just mind-boggling. It's not even about anything - though nominally a James Bond spoof it gives no indication that the writers (four of them, ludicrously enough) ever saw an 007 movie : beyond the credits sequence and very occasional bits of business - the most obvious ones, the concealed gadgets and "Shaken, not stirred" - there's no hint that anyone involved had anything specific in mind beyond their own congenital stupidity. Bits of cartoonishness - popping eyes a la THE MASK - suggest that the target audience may be prepubescent, which explains the incoherence (on the oft-demonstrated Hollywood theory that little kids will watch anything if it moves fast enough) but doesn't explain the (embarrassingly crude) parodies of non-kid movies like PULP FICTION and IN THE LINE OF FIRE. Possibly - who can say? - this began life as a proper joke movie in the AIRPLANE! mould, recycling that film's "The cockpit? What is it?" gag and featuring some enjoyably cheesy bits of tweaking movie conventions (the inevitable background panoply of animal cries outside the villain's jungle headquarters turns out to be a security guard practising out of a book called "Jungle Calls For Guards"), then somehow disintegrated into this staggeringly inept farrago of fart and dick jokes. Surely this pathetic attempt at spoof marks the nadir of Nielsen's comic career? No, that would be REPOSSESSED. And don't call me Shirley.