Hot Shots! Part
Deux is a 1993 comedy
spoof
film, and a sequel to the 1991 comedy
Hot Shots!
Directed again by
Jim Abrahams, the
film again stars
Charlie Sheen,
Lloyd Bridges,
Valeria Golino,
Richard Crenna,
Brenda Bakke,
Miguel
Ferrer,
Rowan Atkinson, and
Jerry Haleva. Sheen, who portrays a
spoof of action heroes, went through a tough
weight lifting/training program to gain the
physique needed to play the role of an
action hero.
Abrahams and
Pat Proft were the writers of
the screenplay. Members of both men's families have roles as
extras.
Plot
At the beginning of the film, a rescue team invades
Saddam Hussein's palace to rescue a group of
hostages. But things go wrong when they are ambushed by Iraqi
guards who open fire. While the gunfight ensues, Saddam is
awakened, with his blindfold on, and starts shooting blindly all
around the interior of his palace. The rescue team is captured and
subdued just before Saddam runs out of his palace screaming and
shooting wildly into the air and falling into the fountain.
Since his last adventure, Topper Harley (
Sheen) has retired from the
Navy and has become a Buddhist in a small Buddhist
village in the wilderness. Colonel Walters (
Crenna) and Michelle Huddleston (
Bakke), CIA, arrive and watch a muscular Topper
fight in a
Muay Thai competition (a spoof
of the
Rambo III opening scene)
in a hilarious sequence which results in the crooked bookmaker's
comical defeat. After Topper's victory, the Colonel and Michelle
persuade Topper to come out of retirement in order to rescue a
rescue party who went in to rescue a rescue party who are being
held as hostages in Iraq. The leader of the Iraqi forces is, of
course,
Saddam Hussein (
Haleva).
At first Topper refuses, but when another rescue mission led by
Walters also goes awry, he finally agrees and parachutes into an
Iraqi jungle with Harbinger (
Ferrer),
Williams (
Colyar) and Rabbinowitz
(
Stiles), close to the heavily guarded
hostage camp. They all land successfully, except for Topper, who
gets snagged in a tree. He soon frees himself with his patented
all-purpose "
Swiss Army"
Bowie knife (a running joke throughout the
film). Their contact turns out to be Topper's former love, Ramada
(
Golino), who guides them to an
abandoned fishing boat that she had prepared for their
transportation, with fishermen's clothes in the wheelhouse. She and
Topper briefly reminisce, and Ramada explains that she was married
before she ever met Topper, but could not tell him about her
husband, Dexter (
Atkinson), for
complicated reasons. She also informs him that Dexter is one of the
captives being held by Saddam.
They all set off down the river. Later, an Iraqi patrol boat passes
by and the Captain boards their fishing boat. After witnessing
their poor fishermen impersonations, the Captain boards the patrol
boat and is about to sail out of sight when he sees Ramada, in
disguise as a man since women are forbidden to fish, enter the
ladies room. Assuming they are cross-dressers, he orders his fellow
crew members to open fire. Topper's squad abandon ship at his word;
Topper takes up the fight, but at the last instant runs out of
ammo, to which the Iraqi Captain laughs sarcastically. Topper hurls
a grenade, which lands in the Captains open mouth and explodes,
destroying him and both boats. When US President Tug Benson
(Admiral Benson in the
previous film)
hears of the supposed failure of yet another mission, he decides to
go to Iraq and take matters into his own hands.
The commandos all reach shore safely (Topper does not do quite so
well). Ramada picks up something Topper had dropped: a
mole, given to him by Michelle after they
had slept together. Topper grows suspicious of Harbinger since he
wasn't around when the patrol boat came. They eventually reach the
Iraqi hostage camp, where an outrageous gunfight ensues, which the
Americans win despite overwhelming odds. During the battle, Topper
finds Harbinger hiding out and at first accuses him of being the
sabotuer; Harbinger reveals that he's giving up battling but Topper
calms him down.
While the squad evacuates the hostages, Topper enters Saddam's
seemingly abandoned palace. He runs into Saddam, who pulls out his
machine pistol and commands Topper to
surrender. Topper quickly disarms Saddam and they engage in a
heated yet comical sword fight. President Benson arrives and orders
Topper to go and rescue Dexter, which he does, while Benson and
Saddam pull out
lightsabers and continue
the duel. Benson eventually defeats Saddam by spraying him with a
fire extinguisher, upon which Saddam and his dog solidify, crack
and melt, only to form again as Saddam in a
Terminator 2 fashion, but with his dog's
head fur, nose, and ears.
In the meantime, tired of waiting, the squad heads back to the army
helicopter, where Ramada discovers that Michelle is the saboteur
who imprisoned Dexter and reveals they used to be roommates at
university. After a complicated revelation, Ramada returns
Michelle's mole and then proceeds to chase her over an assault
course similar to
American
Gladiators. They then started fighting on two platforms
with Ramada winning by hitting Michelle's in the stomach, knocking
the wind out of her and making her fall off the platform.
Dexter arrives with Topper and insists on taking a picture of
Ramada and Topper, claiming "under other circumstances, you'd make
a great couple." However, he backs away too far (in order to take a
picture of them) and topples rather obliviously over a cliff, at
which point Topper and Ramada confess that "he really was a
wiener". Colonel Walters arrests Michelle as President Benson joins
the escapees. Saddam arrives and is about to shoot down the chopper
when Topper and Ramada get rid of extra weight in the chopper by
pushing a huge piano out of the open door, which crushes Saddam in
a
Wizard of Oz style.
Topper and Ramada smile and kiss as they all ride off safely
(literally) into the sunset, although the chopper gets a little
scorched from flying through the sun.
Cast
Parodies
The film parodies action movies such as
Rambo: First Blood Part II,
Rambo III,
Apocalypse Now,
Predator,
Missing In Action, and
Commando, with Richard
Crenna's character acting as an homage to his own roles in the
Rambo movies as Col. Samuel Trautman. It makes references
to several "syndromes" or cliché plot devices common in action
movies, including (but not limited to) the
stormtrooper effect.
On the boat Mr. Sheen also mimicked the way Macaulay Culkin from
the Home Alone movies says, "I don't think so".
It also takes shots at, among other things,
The Hunt for Red
October,
Our Miss
Brooks,
Star Wars,
Kickboxer,
The Karate Kid,
Lady and the Tramp,
Casablanca,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
Total Recall,
Looney Tunes,
No Way Out,
Basic Instinct,
Platoon,
The Guns of Navarone,
The Wizard of
Oz,
The
Godfather,
RoboCop,
American
Gladiators,
Disney's
version of Pinocchio, and the
Energizer Bunny.
Even the movie's
tagline, just deux it, is a parody of the Nike
slogan at the time, "just do it". And one
scene where Lloyd Bridges' character, the president, is working his
way to the rescue operation takes place underwater with a
scuba-diving Bridges doing a voice-over narration, an homage to his
best-known work on the TV series
Sea
Hunt. The play by play during the boxing scene was done by
long-time
Fox Sports play-by-play
announcer
Ron Pitts, in a style parodying
his own
National Football
League playcalling technique.
Charlie Sheen's father,
Martin Sheen,
makes a cameo, parodying his role in
Apocalypse Now. As
Charlie is travelling up the river reflecting on his experience (a
parody of his role in
Platoon), he sees his father Martin
travelling the opposite way and also reflecting in an inner
monologue similar to the voice-over from
Apocalypse Now.
They both stand up, look at each other, and as they pass, both yell
to each other
"I loved you in Wall Street!", a reference to a film
in which they both starred.
Bob Vila, then the host of
Bob Vila's
Home Again, makes a cameo appearance as the tradesman who
installed some insulation to Topper Harley's house in Thailand.
When an Iraqi ship arrives to capture Harley and crew, we see that
it is named
The Behn Gazzara, a reference to actor
Ben Gazzara, and one of its captain's
oaths (in the gobbledegook Iraqi language used by both this and the
first film) is "
Omar Sharif!".
The film also mocks past US history, such as
George H. W. Bush
vomiting on
Japanese prime minister Kiichi
Miyazawa and Jimmy Carter's failed
rescue operation Operation Eagle Claw
where the rescue mission to rescue the
American hostages had to be rescued by another rescue mission. the
main parodie of the film however is the likeness of Topper Harley
to Rambo.
Reception
Reviews for
Hot Shots! Part Deux were generally
favorable, although not to the extent of its predecessor. This
helped it become a financial success at the box office in 1993,
grossing over $130 million worldwide.
Trivia
[Aaron Eckhart ]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001173/ (Harevy Dent /
TwoFace in The Dark Knight) has a small early role in this film as
a hostage extra. Look out for him in the scene where Topper Harley
(Sheen) has just rescued Col Walters and goes to free the other
hostages. Ramada asks him where they are keeping her husband Dexter
(Rowan Atkinson). he also appears as they get out of the taxi at
the end of the film and into the choppers.
Mockumentary promotion
As part of the film's promotion, a
mockumentary was aired on
Home Box Office. Entitled
Hearts of Hot
Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker's Apology, the
mockumentary parodied
Hearts of Darkness:
A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the 1991 documentary about the
making of the film
Apocalypse
Now (which starred Charlie Sheen's father, Martin
Sheen).
UK Version
The version of the film released in the UK has had over 1 minute of
BBFC cuts. These however were re-instated for an uncut showing on
ITV1 in 2007.
References
- Hearts
of Hot Shots! Part Deux - A Filmmaker's Apology Television show -
Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux - A Filmmaker's Apology TV Show -
Yahoo! TV
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