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.[2] This helped it become a financial success at the box office in 1993, grossing over $130 million worldwide[3].
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).[4]
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
External links
