Posted on December 30, 2025
Posted by John Scalzi
Top Secret! (the exclamation point is part of the title) makes not one single solitary goddamned bit of sense. It’s a movie from the 80s with a hero from the 50s in a geopolitical setting from the 60s featuring stock characters from the 40s, starring an actor whose biggest hits would happen in the 90s. Confused yet? Welcome. Sit down, we have a story to tell.
And that is that Top Secret! is not really the story of whatever the hell the story of Top Secret! is, it’s the story of three filmmakers — Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, known collectively as “ZAZ” — who had a phenomenal success with a movie and now had to follow it up with more of the same. The phenomenal hit was Airplane! (yes, that exclamation point is a running gag), the 1980 spoof that was made for $3.5 million and raked in $83 million at the box office, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of the year. It’s the sort of smash hit you dream about making, until the movie studio comes back to you and says, basically, “do it exactly the same, but different.”
This is hard to do! Especially when the movie in question is Airplane!, which was less a movie than it is a non-stop automated buffet of slapstick, sight gags and absurdist dialogue, sending up disaster films, one of the most reliable genres of spectacle in the 70s, and the very successful Airport series of films in particular (also a 1957 movie called Zero Hour, whose plot ZAZ borrowed from so liberally that they ended up having to get the rights for it, which technically makes Airplane! a remake). Audiences of 1980 understood the scaffolding on which all the jokes for Airplane! were hung. They were all the hits they’d seen in the theaters and drive-throughs in the years right before this one.
When it was time for a sequel, the obvious thing to do was just to make Airplane! Two!, but ZAZ chose to zig instead of zag (there was an Airplane 2: The Sequel in 1982, which ZAZ had nothing to do with; it was written and directed by a Ken Finkelstein, who would that same year write Grease 2, and what can one say about that, except, that’s an interesting filmography you got there, Mr. Finkelstein). First ZAZ made Police Squad! for TV, which lasted six episodes, and then they made Top Secret!, with the mishmash of plots and influences mentioned above.
Top Secret! didn’t exactly flop. But after raking in just $20 million in box office off a $9 million budget, it wasn’t the smash hit Airplane! was, either (Box Office Mojo has it coming in as the 43rd most successful movie of 1984, below Never Cry Wolf, but above Hot Dog… the Movie, which for the avoidance of doubt was a movie about skiing, not tubes of processed meat). What happened? My best guess is that Airplane! was parodying one thing, disaster movies, which the audience knew about. Top Secret! parodied many things, none of which the audience cared about, and then mashed them all together, making them make even less sense. Jokes are jokes but if you want to sell them in the world of 1984, you had do a little more work, apparently.
Don’t feel too bad for ZAZ. They got their mojo back in 1986 with Ruthless People, and in 1988 with The Naked Gun (written by ZAZ, directed by just one Z), which unlike Top Secret! was parodying just one thing again. Then in 1990 Jerry Zucker, by himself, had the number one box office hit of the year with Ghost. They did fine. But it does leave Top Secret! as the odd man out in their filmography. Heck, even 1977’s The Kentucky Fried Movie, which ZAZ wrote with John Landis directing, was more successful as a matter of return on investment.
It’s a shame because Top Secret! is hilarious, and in the fullness of time, in which all the cinematic antecedents of this film sort of blur into mush and don’t really matter anymore — just as they’ve done with Airplane! and The Naked Gun — the ridiculous rat-at-tat of the jokes in this film are the thing that remain and shine. They’re just as good as the ones you get in those other films (with the admission that “good” is not precisely the word for these jokes), and in some cases they might even be better.
And none of ZAZ’s other films has this film’s secret weapon, which is Val Kilmer, in his big screen debut. Kilmer plays the pop star Nick Rivers, who is so clearly based on 50s Elvis that Kilmer showed up for his audition as Elvis, or at least an Elvis impersonator, with an Elvis song prepared (and yet Nick Rivers’ “big hit” is a Beach Boys pastiche, so… go figure). Kilmer was unquestionably one of the prettiest humans on the planet when he made this movie (prettier even than his costar Lucy Gutteridge, who was plenty pretty by actual mortal human standards), and he even sings all the Nick Rivers songs in the movie. If ever there was someone meant to play a 50s rock star in the 80s going to visit an East Germany stuck in the 60s with French rebels from the 40s, it was Kilmer.
The ZAZ team have commented that the Julliard-trained Kilmer sometimes had problems understanding his character, but it doesn’t show in the final product. Also, really now, what’s there to understand? Stand there and look pretty, Val! Sing a song! Play your lines like you’re in an actual movie, not a parody! This ain’t rocket science! It is submarine science, since there’s a plot point (such as it is) that a kidnapped scientist is trying to develop mines to destroy NATO’s submarine capabilities, but never mind that now! Anyway, Kilmer is perfect in this role. I understand that it was his role as Iceman in Top Gun that launched ten million confused sexualities, but just know some of us got there early with this one. Yes, I admit it, my sexuality is “Straight with a carve-out for Nick Rivers.” Now you know.
Don’t worry about the plot. For God’s sake, don’t worry about the plot. This is one movie that is improved, in the matter of story, by having slept through any class you might have ever taken on 20th Century European history. No one under the age of 36 was even alive for the fall of the Berlin Wall; the idea of the East Germans anachronistically wearing WWII-era German uniforms will make even less sense to them than it did at the time for those of us now in the full bloom of middle age. What is the French resistance doing in East Germany? Don’t ask. Did East Germany have Bavarian-decorated malt shops where the kids wore poodle skirts? I said, don’t ask. And how does an underwater Western saloon fit into all of this? Listen, kid. I keep telling you.
I do wonder how this movie would play for anyone not alive or cognizant in the 80s, much less the several other decades referenced in this film. My feeling is that it would play well, for the reason I mention above, that the fullness of time has rendered its provenance mostly irrelevant, so the silly jokes are what last. Sure, the jokes about LeRoy Nieman paintings and the Carter Administration won’t play the same way, but there’s another joke coming up 30 seconds later anyway, it’s fine.
That said, I can’t know, short of sitting a millennial or Gen Z person down and making them watch the film. It’s possible they might just watch it and go, wow, that was certainly a thing that happened. But maybe they’ll just go with it and enjoy Top Secret! anyway. They could take comfort in knowing they wouldn’t be the first.
— JS
Like this:
Like Loading…
← The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Nine: Apollo 13