Top Secret
(1978)
Director: Paul Leaf
Cast: Bill Cosby, Tracy Reed, Sheldon Leonard
If you
remember your childhood, you can probably remember that a good part of
it was absolutely fascinated with so many things of our world. Remember
when you first stared learning about the oceans? You learned about all
the exotic life that's known to exist below the surface. Yet there is
much more we don't know about the oceans - they are so deep that only a
tiny percentage of them have been explored. Even as an adult, you have
to wonder just what new or secret things may be under the surface.
Another thing that fascinated us kids were some of the ways adults made
a living, jobs that seemed for the priviledged or the just plain lucky.
An example of this is a job that seemingly every kid wants to be when
they grow up - an astronaut. Bobbing around in zero gravity, going on
spacewalks, or even landing and walking on the moon. But as an adult, I
can see that a number of flashy jobs like that I dreamed about as an
adult lost their luster as the years passed and I absorbed new
infomation about those jobs. While there may be many cool things about
being an astronaut, you would suffer from a loss of many things we take
for granted back on earth. You would have no privacy, being stuck in
very small quarters with the rest of your crew. Having to go to the
bathroom in a plastic baggie right next to someone would be pretty
embarrassing. And if your nose started to itch when you were out of
your spacecraft and in your spacesuit, you would probably have to
suffer the itch for a long time before you were able to return to your
spacecraft so you could take off your helmet and scratch that itch.
Another job that I'm pretty sure most children dream
about having when they are grown up is being some kind of secret agent.
I had that dream myself as a child, but that dream took a little longer
to form in my head than with other children. You see, I had to go to
bed earlier than other children my age, so I was cut off from TV
programming and movies that were about the secret agent profession.
Finally, one night my parents let me stay up to watch the movie You Only Live Twice
- my first James Bond movie. By the end of the movie I was tired (maybe
my parents were right and I needed more sleep), but I was also hooked.
I watched every James Bond movie that subsequently came on TV, and any
other avenue that showcased secret agents, like other movies or books,
I devoured. There was so much about the secret agent lifestyle that
seemed cool. You would always be sent to exotic locations on your
mission, inevitably to at least one place that was tropical. There were
all those cool gadgets that your agency would give you, gadgets that
you would always finding yourself using on a mission. Being a spy also
meant that you would get into a lot of action, where you'd see stuff
blown up good. There would be a lot more violence you could infllict on
the bad guys with martial arts (every agent is an expert on martial
arts) and guns. And let's not forget about the women you'd encounter on
your travels, women that always seemed to be available when you met
them, and you could easily dispose of them shortly after a mission was
done.
But as time went by, little by little the supposed
coloful life as a spy lost its enticement to me. I learned that the
cool gadgets that spies supposedly had were limited, and were mainly to
do with boring stuff like listening in on a conversation instead of
killing those in a conversation. I learned that there isn't
that much
call for spying in tropical nations, except maybe for Cuba. (And with
the Cold War over and Cuba not supported by Russia, Cuba isn't exactly
a big a threat as it once might have been.) I learned that spying is
mostly investigating, with long periods of nothing happening, and that
explosions and gunfire are rare. And with new threats like nuclear
terrorism, spying can no longer be seen as fun, but only as serious and
necessary business. That's why, when I found a copy of Top Secret
(not to be confused with the Val Kilmer movie of the same name), I had
a little queasy
feeling. The movie deals with the threat of nuclear terrorism, yet it
also promised to be an amusing look at spying - which you might have
guessed with Bill Cosby being in the cast. But I decided I would still
give it a chance - it might work, at least as being the reflection of a
more innocent time. Cosby plays Aaron Strickland, a New York art dealer
who is actually an undercover agent for the U.S. government. When a
large amount of plutonium is stolen from a warehouse in Italy,
Strickland is assigned to track it and the thieves down. He's told
he'll be paired up with an agent in Italy named McGee, and McGee
happens to be (gasp!) a woman (actress Tracy Reed). Though both agents
have their differences with each other right from the start, they
reluctantly start working on their assignment. The plutonium theft
seems to center around former New York crime boss Carl Vitale (Sheldon
Leonard, who was also the movie's executive producer), but is he
responsible?
I am sure that many people who have the opportunity to
watch Top Secret
will be watching it in order to see if Cosby tries to shake his
family-friendly image, imagining that if he tries doing it there will
be a lot of unintended laughs. They'll smile thinking of Cosby shooting
guns, using high tech gadgets like jet packs, and getting into
fisticuffs and kung fu battles with the bad guys, just like James Bond
does. (Though I am fairly certain that these same viewers will not want
to see Cosby involved in bedroom sequences with various ladies.) But
sadly, I have to report that Cosby's character is not involved in that
much James Bond-like activity. There are no high-tech gadgets anywhere
in the movie, for one thing, and I don't recall him ever firing a gun
at any moment (though he is seen carrying guns a few times.) He does
use his fists a few times, but these fight sequences are only a few
seconds long. There is one scene where he is battling someone carrying
a knife, and his frantic jumping around to avoid the knife is somewhat
amusing,
but that's it for unintentionally funny superspy action. Cosby simply
does not get much of a chance to act like what most of us would
consider to be a super spy. Perhaps that was a good thing, since much
of the movie strives to be pretty serious, and seeing someone like
Cosby as some kind of superman in this surrounding would have seemed
very out of place - especially since this is
Cosby we're talking about. But Cosby does seem to be out of place here
all the same. He tries to put up a serious front, but he can't resist
every so often from displaying his trademark mugging into the camera,
as well as speaking in a way that sounds like he is on stage doing his
stand-up comedy routine.
I know that Cosby mixed spying with humor successfully
before, in the I Spy
TV series. But here it simply doesn't work. Part of the reason may be
because there's not much that's funny about nuclear terrorism nowadays.
Had the
plot concerned something lighter, like an art theft, Cosby's silliness
may have been more acceptable. Maybe also the screenwriter would have
turned out a better script, because he doesn't seem to know that much
about spying or other subjects like the handling of nuclear materials.
The plutonium in this movie is stolen from a flimsy warehouse with
incredibly bad security, and its manufacturer so badly packaged the
material up that it gives anyone who's near it radiation poisoning. As
for the spying, even those viewers who have never been to spy school
will recognize that the protagonists make a number of goofs. Early in
the movie, Cosby identifies a terrorist at a party because of the
terrorist's radiation poisoning signs, Cosby does not stay silent and
follow the terrorist once the party is over. Instead, he immediately
provokes the terrorist, which leads to the terrorist fleeing the scene
and a subsequent car/foot chase that results in the terrorist getting
away - not surprising, since capturing and questioning the terrorist at
this point of the movie would have resulted in a twenty minute movie.
As Cosby's partner, Reed's character is also pretty unprofessional,
expressing anger being saddled with him right at their first meeting
despite knowing next to nothing about him at that point. You might
think that with a serious assignment like they have, she'd want all the
help she could get, but she is simply mad so that the movie can add
some artifical chemistry between the two characters.
You might think that some genuine chemistry might form
between the two characters as the movie progresses, but you would be
wrong. For some reason, Cosby's character is (happily) married back in
New York, so there is no romance between Cosby and Reed. So Cosby and
Reed just end up kind of admiring each other. That's not the only
questionable use of characters in the movie. The terrorists are a bland
bunch - I think we just learn the name of one of them during the entire
movie, and we never find out just what cause they are fighting for and
need the plutonium for. And as for the former crime boss, who
(unsurprisingly) is indeed involved with the plutonium theft, guess
what happens to him at the end of the movie? Surprisingly, nothing.
After the heroes catch the terrorists and get back the plutonium not
long after escaping the clutches of the crime boss, they don't even try
to capture the crime boss. He is simply forgotten about. Not only is
the script lacking substance, what we get to see in front of us isn't
that thrilling at all. Knowing that the movie was actually shot on
location in Italy might lead you to think that we would at least get
some pleasant eye candy. But most of the Italian locations are poorly
chosen. Instead of looking exotic, they look worn out and downright
filthy to boot, often shot under overcast skies and with patches of mud
all over the ground. And as for any display of action, you pretty much
better forget about it. Most of the movie is devoted to Cosby and Reed
talking and sleuthing - pretty boring stuff. Though if you remember
what I said about real-life spying in the third paragraph of this
review, maybe Top
Secret did get at least one thing right after all.
Check
for availability on Amazon (VHS)
See also: For Your Height Only,
99 And 44/100% Dead, Up To His Ears
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