Cinema
Hot Shots!
(12', Odeon Leicester Square) The Indian Runner (`15', Cannon Tottenham Court Road)
Secret weapon
Harriet Waugh
One might be excused for thinking from the opening credits of Hot Shots! that one was witnessing a different kind of movie than might be expected from the makers of Airplane and Naked Gun 2'12. In the early dawn light, huge, gleaming, beautiful-looking American bombers are moving around on the tarmac. They make an awesome sight. Then realisation dawns that everything is a little out of kilter. What looks like a deformed ballet gradually develops into farce. Then you are away; Hot Shots! is very, very funny.
This spoof on the American Navy's air pilots stars Charlie Sheen as 'Topper'
Harley, a handsome, vigorous hunk with dark hair and white smile. He is an ace pilot who has opted out after he went berserk in the air and is invited back to join an elite corps of Navy flyers embarking on a dangerous mission. Topper, who is a bas ket case, soon turns out to be the most dangerous thing on the mission. Other dan- gers include born-to-die 'Dead Meat' Thompson and 'Wash-Out' Pfaffenback (Jon Cryer), who between gulping handfuls of pills has something called 'wall-eye vision'. Equally wall-eyed is the leader of the mission, Admiral 'Tug' Benson, won- derfully played by Lloyd Bridges, who is entirely made of tin because every piece of him has been renewed, the consequence of flying failed missions, It soon turns out that industrialists of a rival military plane are out to sabotage the mission and without his knowing it Topper is their secret weapon. Every display of syn- chronised military drill turns into synchro- nised devastation. The body is used to comic effect as a battering-ram that goes wham and falls splat. The sex interest is provided by Romada, who is the outfit's psychiatrist. She is slinky, foreign-accented and a torch dancer. She tells Topper, 'I can go all night like a lumberjack' — or at least I think that's what she said — and in an entirely delightful scene they engage in some of the funniest foreplay depicted on screen. She is played by Valeria Galin°, who has improved a lot since she was Tom Cruise's incomprehensible girlfriend in Rain Man. The enemy say things like `Ah shish kebab!' to each other.
This is the kind of film America does best. The humour is physical, verbal and fantastic. Unlike the whimsical, sickly vari- ety served up in Fisher King, it is based on the reality of American experience. It is immensely slick, not a frame too long. good-humoured, black-humoured and fun.
In its own way The Indian Runner (which oddly enough also stars Valeria Golino) is as American in feeling as Hot Shots!, but it comes out of a very different tradition: that of the slow-burn, psychological buddie movie where a man needs to know, out there in the great American landscape, what the other man thinks, and what makes him act like that. Acting like that in this sort of movie usually means hitting some- one. It starts promisingly enough. in a starkly beautiful snowscape in Nebraska under the watchful gaze of a single bird, two cars, one a police car, race. It ends when out in the snow Joe Roberts, the sweet-faced sheriff sergeant, shoots in self-defence the occu- pant of the other car. This shooting is sym- bolic of what could happen between Joe (David Morse) and his younger brother Frank (Viggo Mortensen), who is returning from Vietnam and is trouble.
During the rest of the film Joe and Frank try — groaningly slowly — to come to terms with the meaning of life. Directed and written by Sean Penn, the film is, how- ever, well acted and Mortensen, who is full of hidden menace, has a strong screen presence. If you happened to like The Deer Hunter, which I did not, you might possibly like this.
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