POLICE ACADEMY 1984
54%
Directed by Hugh Wilson
Written by Neal Israel, Pat Proft, Hugh Wilson
Starring Steve Guttenberg, Kim Cattrall, G. W. Bailey, Bubba Smith, George Gaynes,
Leslie Easterbrook, Michael Winslow
Synopsis
As the result of a new policy enacted by a recently elected mayor in response to a shortage of police officers, a flood of ordinary, unqualified citizens enters the police academy and wreaks havoc, much to the chagrin of the veteran staff charged with training them.
Why We Love It
As far as R-rated comedies go, Police Academy is fairly tame, but that wasn’t always the case. As originally conceived by producer Paul Maslansky, it was a much naughtier affair, full of gratuitous nudity, gross-out humor, and crude observations on race and gender. What audiences got was something of a compromise between his vision and that of WKRP in Cincinnati director Hugh Wilson, who did his best to tamp down the racier elements in the script. In retrospect, it’s difficult to say whether a more vulgar version of Police Academy would have resonated better with critics, but its six (that’s right, six) sequels all muted the adult elements even further and largely received far worse reviews—the last four entries in the franchise all earned zero-percent Tomatometer scores. In other words, taken as a whole, this is an abysmal collection of films full of juvenile, lowest-common-denominator humor, but it would be silly to dismiss the first installment outright.
Spoof comedies are traditionally hit-or-miss efforts composed of sketches and set pieces; Police Academy may bat a lower average with its jokes than classics of the genre, but those that do land do so because of the game cast. Leading man Steve Guttenberg is at peak smarm in his breakout role, doling out wisecracks and lighting up the screen with the same boyish charm we’d later see in Cocoon, Short Circuit, and Three Men and a Baby. As Lieutenant Harris, G. W. Bailey is so obnoxious that when he’s launched headfirst into a horse’s anus in one of the film’s defining gags, we’re too busy relishing the schadenfreude to question the stupidity of the moment. Leslie Easterbrook essentially plays a proto-Brigitte Nielsen as the ass-kicking maneater Sgt. Callahan, Michael Winslow is all blips and screeches in possibly the only appropriate outlet for his sound effect–based comedy, and George Gaynes’s doofy Commandant Lassard is right up there with The Naked Gun’s Frank Drebin and Airplane!’s Steve “Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Quit Sniffing Glue” McCroskey.
With all of its needless vulgarity, potty humor, slapstick, and off-color jokes about race and gender, Police Academy feels a bit like a children’s comedy pretending to be grown up: it’s kind of gross and a little offensive, and it doesn’t always know where it’s going. But then it does something hilarious, and once you’ve had a laugh and collected yourself, you want to lean over and say, “Aww, you made a funny!”