If Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd team up in a movie, make it one worthy of their comic talents. As such, "Spies Like Us" is fitfully amusing with a few chuckles strewn through the last half of the picture. The first half is often uproarious but I still feel, after close to 40 years when I first saw it, that the potential was not fully realized.
The opening half-hour has plenty of laughs as we have a legacy government employee, a womanizing diplomat's son named Emmett Fitz-Hume (Chevy Chase), who doesn't disclose much to the press by pretending his mike is getting cut off (very funny stuff). Then there's the smart Austin Millbarge (Dan Aykroyd), a code-breaker who is relegated to working in the basement of the Pentagon and never allowed much advancement. Both of them have less than 24 hours to take a Foreign Service Exam which Emmett tries to cheat by use of a false arm sling and an eyepatch and asks Austin, "What does KGB stand for?" Neither passes the exam of more than 500 questions and yet they are promoted as spies! Say what? Well, they are actually decoys since the Defense Intelligence Agency doesn't expect them to complete their mission; they are meant as a distraction from the real spies. There's also the launching of a Soviet ICBM nuclear missile that is part of a laser guidance system in space and...everything goes wrong.
Chevy Chase is at his best when sizing up a situation by minimizing it, particularly during a G-Force training scene where he glibly says, "Piece of cake." He is fantastically funny when he cheats on the exam in an extended sequence that stands out as flat-out comedy magic. Less funny is the Pakistan desert footage with an excruciating moment where everyone addresses themselves as doctors when, in fact, there are no actual doctors. Ha! Bob Hope, by the way, pops into frame playing golf and I had wished the movie had more of that kind of lunacy. Director John Landis is known for his in-joke cameos and this movie could've used more of them. When Chase and Aykroyd arrive at the Soviet border in below freezing temperatures, the movie packs up a little more heat with the doofus pair dressed as extraterrestrials as they try to fool the Russians.
I will say Aykroyd is naturally adept at delivering nuclear jargon like an automaton and he is as always immensely likable. Chase, though, seems to walk away with this movie yet I wished the writers (including co-writer Aykroyd) tried to make the twosome more compatible. Still, on director's John Landis comedy meter, not as good as his "Animal House" or "Trading Places" though miles ahead of most other nuclear comedies such as the excruciatingly unfunny "Deal of the Century." And I still don't remember what KGB stands for.
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