Every film franchise can learn from its mistakes, even Police Academy. Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol left no place for the series to go, except endless, mindless repetition. That model was not sustainable, as it necessitates the consistent expansion of an already over-wieldy cast. The fates intervened, reduced that cast, and what may at first have seemed a tragedy was in fact a blessing in disguise.
Steve Guttenberg left the series that’d been so good to him, and vice versa. His Hollywood star was rising (sarcasm), and scheduling conflicts forced the bland Guttenberg to opt for Three Men and a Baby over Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach. Can you even imagine the ragged, post-apocalyptic world where Steve Guttenberg doesn’t appear in Police Academy movies?! Well, look around, you’re living in it!
The thing is, Guttenberg was actually an albatross for these movies, I’d say, with his lame wannabe Bill Murray schtick. Good riddance! And forced to confront a reduced cast for the first time, the series goes all out in the firings and pares things down solely to the other core cast members (Fackler excluded already). Summing up by name and one- or two-word trait, which is all which defines these characters, here is what makes up a Guttenbergless Police Academy:
Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow): Makes noises
Eugene Tackleberry (David Graf): Militaristic
Moses Hightower (Bubba Smith): Strong
Laverne Hooks (Marion Ramsey): Meek
Debbie Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook): Sexy
To these five, add a lone new(ish) addition, the sole worthwhile newbie from Citizens on Patrol:
Thomas “House” Conklin (Tab Thacker): Fat
These aren’t movie characters! These are the minimum amount of traits you need to qualify as a “person” in anything other than a slasher movie. You’d think, five movies in, they’d have a bit more definition than that. And you can see why the other Police Academies were stagnating. Imagine a writer’s task: Given a firing range setting, make jokes for each of the six traits above. Then do likewise for the gym, then the bar, then the locker room, etc. Then, when the sequel rolls around, make new jokes for the same traits at the same locations. Hence why Citizens on Patrol resorted to adding about fifteen other trait-bearing ciphers.
Assignment Miami Beach discovers, late in the series game, a solution many other franchises happen upon with far greater efficiency; Location switches make up for other surfeits. Hence it works to keep this small, shallow pool, and put ‘em someplace new. And with the beach, the ocean, the airplane, it’s amazing how freed up the jokes are, relatively speaking!
Actually, forcing an entry to occur elsewhere (i.e. Miami) necessitates many more changes for the better. For one, this Police Academy has more of a plot than merely “cadets are trained,” which I am sick to death of. Rather, Commandant Lassard (George Gaynes, series regular) is set to receive the Police Officer of the Decade award at the Miami Police Convention. And with Guttenberg off not furthering his career elsewhere, and none of the other regulars capable of even the slightest interest, it falls to Lassard to be the movie’s heart. As the elder superior of the rest of the goon squad, this makes perfect sense, and somehow gives Assignment Miami Beach a little more direction than usual.
(And I don’t mean Alan Myerson’s direction, for we have another identity-free helmer here. For one thing, Myerson has no variation to his compositions, as these first two screen pics are separated by over fifteen minutes of movie.)
Still, the show is going on the road. Because it is a series standard for a “bad” cop to strangely oppose Lassard for no good reason, Harris and Proctor are back (G. W. Bailey and Lance Kinsey, agaiiiin). As Lassard is due for a mandatory retirement (providing an actual attempt at emotional heartbreak), Harris guns for his old commandant position. With this not forthcoming, he decides – for reasons which are no doubt clear to him at least – to go to Miami and impress everyone. Okay, whatever. It’s just an excuse to see Harris and Proctor humiliate themselves, due to no outside influence, time and again. As an effort to outfit this series with its own variation on The Pink Panther’s Inspector Dreyfus, Harris (or Mauser) ain’t up to scratch.
In fact, The Pink Panther suggests a line of discussion I’d intended to put off. That is namely, though these Police Academies are not particularly good comedies, that isn’t to say the germ is a poor one. Peter Sellers’ Pink Panthers show how a similar immature sense of humor, told with care and thought and craft, can be remarkably effective – and in the same basic cop milieu. Roughly parallel to Police Academy, The Naked Gun movies were perpetuating the “dumb cop endures interminable pratfalls” form, with dry seriousness replacing flailing desperation. Further down the road, Broken Lizard’s Super Troopers more specifically shows even the “goofy group of cops” subgenre Police Academy arguably pioneered could be done better, when created by a group with a cohesive comic sensibility. Then Edgar Wright’s marvelous Hot Fuzz showed a cop comedy could even reach the upper echelons of popular moviemaking overall, though it opts to borrow the language of cop action movies more often than cop comedies.
But with the Miami setting, Assignment Miami Beach perhaps most resembles Reno 911!: Miami, the feature film of Comedy Central’s “Reno 911!” Actually, it too centers around out-of-towner cops subbing for the locals when criminals sabotage a local police convention – This is so similar to Assignment Miami Beach, one almost wonders why a 2007 movie felt the need to use Police Academy 5 as its major inspiration. Though it’s a useful entity, as comic approach is everything; the “Reno 911!” cast is similar to Broken Lizard in their unity as a comedic mind, something I never once sensed from the Police Academy brigade.
I anticipate the plot by mentioning criminals at the police convention. That assumes a larger plot which is…sorta in place. Upon reaching Miami (after a surprisingly non-painful bunch of airport-based slapstick antics, mostly centered upon Lassard’s love of golf), Lassard’s bag is switched with that of middling jewel thieves Tony and Mouse (Rene Auberjonois and Archie Hahn). No one realizes this yet, because contrivance and universal stupidity is the guiding principal of the Police Academy universe. But when Tony and Mouse discover their diamonds have been replaced with a goldfish in a tank (the logistics of Lassard’s goldfish in the carryon seriously stretch credibility, even here), they begin an effort to retrieve the bag in Lassard’s possession.
The crooks’ bungle around the corners of the frame, like an incompetent variation on Michael Myers, lending Assignment Miami Beach its most consistent thought for the entire middle section. Otherwise, the promise of old characters in a new setting is enough, as our heroes proceed to do whatever gags they can in a beach setting. This is already after their plane flight has taken a quarter of an hour. Actually, if I were in a generous mood, I’d suggest there is some silent comedy sensibility to this arrangement, as the crew’s travels simply justify individual gag routines, and nothing more. It seems they’ve finally found their grounding in late-series juvenile comedy, as the former three sequels struggled with their voice in a post-vulgar world (the first Police Academy was too much of a wannabe Animal House to be thoroughly childish).
Aiding the cast in their idleness, ever so coincidentally Lassard happens to have a nephew in Miami Beach, whom he’s never mentioned before. Meet Sergeant Nick Lassard (Matt McCoy), the ostensible “straight man” replacement for an MIA Steve Guttenberg. In most series, such a lead replacement would seem desperate and somewhat offensive (such as in Curse of the Pink Panther), but instead Nick demonstrates how inessential Guttenberg’s Mahoney was. Without a dedicated presence, he is simply bland, and rather isolated from the core group of yuck-meisters.
Joining Nick is Officer Kate (Janet Jones), who would be, in a differently-concerned Police Academy, the boring, go-nowhere love interest for Nick. I guess she sorta is in this one, except both are so anonymous, they mostly recede into the wallpaper. Though Kate does provide an amble amount of PG-rated T&A (which the rest of the Miami populace also obliges in, one reason this is the series’ best sequel to date). Of course, with Debbie Callahan around, this slot is already filled, and more curvaceously I might add. Oh well, can’t fault ‘em for trying!
Oh well. Would that an entire listless, sloppy comedy could be filled out with beach and bikini scenes – with the raunchiest joke being Harris getting the word “Dork” tanned onto his chest – but there’s that police convention to get to, and the plot hidden deep within its darkest recesses. This convention is an excuse to bring up the usual, tired Police Academy situations, like the firing range, the gym, the locker room, etc. Get ready for the fifth joke about Tackleberry’s enthusiasm for rifles and targets. No, there’s no variation. Why do you ask? Actually, this whole section is a prime example of what my problem was with Police Academy 4. Having it reoccur here (though with reduced screen time) just highlights how much better off the rest of this mess is.
Anyway, over one day after reaching Miami, Lassard finally decided to see how his beloved goldfish is doing – having left the creature inside his carryon luggage in the hotel the entire time – or at least that’s what Lassard assumes, as rather the fish is in the possession of a local Miami crime lord, and I actually forget what eventually happens to it. (As live action cartoons, this same fish has already died a number of times in the other sequels, to no effect.) But I’m getting distracted.
Start again! Lassard checks the bag, finds a camcorder (which amuses him with its homemade sex tapes within [!]), later finds diamonds within said camcorder. This is at the police convention, where Tony, Mouse, and several other semi-Scarface mooks loiter. Armed with a single pistol (in the center of the nation’s police conference, I might add), Tony manages to take Lassard hostage, and flee. This was deemed “simpler” than just nabbing the camcorder, because there can be “no witnesses.” Um…look, the story demands Lassard gets kidnapped at this stage, so just go with it. It’s not like the rest has been airtight anyway.
The joke here (and they do at least fashion a farcical, consistent joke) is that Lassard thinks this is all a practical joke, having learned the Miami Police Convention is wont to stage such “felonies” as a lark. So he is astoundingly genial in Tony’s care. It’s remarkable, you know, to see a single comic conceit in a Police Academy last for over a minute, let alone an entire climax, but that’s just what happens here! They rather over-rely upon this gag, however.
No matter, Lassard’s officers from…whatever town they hail from (at least now we know it’s in Williams County, which…doesn’t narrow it down)…okay, those non-Miami police, they lead the rescue effort. This reasonably resembles the climaxes from other Police Academies, and even involves a boat chase as in Back in Training, so there isn’t much to say. This is the one moment where Assignment Miami Beach pales in comparison with its recent predecessors, as the fan boat finale is insufficiently ridiculous after jet skis and hot air balloons.
But even so, this is the better film (or I’m getting franchise-based Stockholm Syndrome again), owing almost wholly to two things: location change, and cast reduction. Any other positive attributes totally spring up from those factors, which were possibly even unintentional. I mean, Assignment Miami Beach takes every opportunity it is given to make the same asinine errors endemic to its series, so I’m sure were it possible it would’ve screwed things up further. Don’t get me wrong, Police Academy 5 is still a stupid, dumb, imbecilic, moronic, low IQ, foolish movie, but it’s not quite as developmentally stunted as some of its fellows.
Nineteen-eighty-eight was a big year for Police Academy, as it saw the franchise expand its beat beyond films, into the realm of the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff. Owing to how ridiculously cartoony thee movies has always been, it’s a natural thing to make “Police Academy.” Beyond providing twelve caricatures of Police Academy superstars, the genuine cartoon takes advantage of its medium to add bizarre new concepts – because that’s surely what was missing from these things. Hence there is a regular roster of ridiculous criminal villains, with names like Kingpin, Numbskull, Mr. Sleaze, Phoenix Amazona, Lockjaw, The Phantom, Seedy McLeech, Mr. Crameneil, Kranz, Dr. Kamaleon, Mr. Bimmelman, Flung Hi, Mr. Glitch and Cratchit, King Neptune, Waxen Wayne, Dr. Mackle, Falcon, Big Mary, Fox, Mr. Watkips and Watso, Skull Ned, The Incredible Shandar, Bad Knight, the Mexican Gang, the Twin Hunmongo, Mr. Shee, Pack, Squitty and Fufy the crocodile. Need I go on? This greatly amuses me!
Also, our heroes get “wacky” crime-fighting gadgets, embracing the silliness and becoming something of an off-brand “Inspector Gadget.”
Also also, there’s the K-9 Corps, a troupe of talking dogs, because there aren’t enough characters to keep track of already. Let’s see, here we have Samson, Lobo, Bonehead, Chilipepper and Schitzy. It seems they’re all ethnic stereotypes, like in Oliver & Co., making up for a deficiency in the live action movies. Also, this makes the show a font of tired kid-vid clichés – it really is a part of the classic Police Academy ethos.
Wow, we’ve gone from podium blowjobs to this, a kiddie cartoon from the era of pandering, bottom-of-the-barrel kiddie cartoons. What a fascinating five years it’s been, and what a testament to how the series has changed. And it’s with this reputation, as an engenderer of idiocy in multiple mediums, that the Police Academy movies continue on, for nothing can stop them except unprofitability, and we’re not there yet.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Police Academy (1984)
• No. 2 Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985)
• No. 3 Police Academy 3: Back in Training (1986)
• No. 4 Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)
• No. 6 Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989)
• No. 7 Police Academy: Mission to Moscow (1994)
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