Spies Like Us

    Spies Like Us
    1985

    Synopsis

    Two bumbling government employees think they are U.S. spies, only to discover that they are actually decoys for nuclear war.

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    Cast

    • Chevy ChaseEmmett Fitz-Hume
    • Dan AykroydAustin Millbarge
    • Steve ForrestGeneral Sline
    • Donna DixonKaren Boyer
    • Bruce DavisonRuby
    • Terry GilliamDr. Imhaus
    • Frank OzTest Monitor
    • Vanessa AngelRussian Rocket Crewperson
    • Bernie CaseyColonel Rhumbus
    • Charles McKeownJerry Hadley

    Recommendations

    • 63

      Chicago Tribune

      One imagines that fans of Chase and Aykroyd will be mildly pleased with the results. As political humor, though, Spies is an uneasy blend of seriousness and farce--a picture whose antiwar theme seems designed to let its makers cash their paychecks and, at the same time, feel good about themselves. [06 Dec 1985, p.A]
    • 38

      The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

      Good Landis work looks like a comically heightened reality, and it scores with sharp moments in which the world is ridiculous and being American is possibly just as ridiculous. Spies Like Us, his latest, ranks with his poorest efforts, in which strange people start out in extraordinary situations and the lead characters have a pig-out; pushing for wildness, Landis gets mired in crudity (as in Animal House). [09 Dec 1985]
    • 30

      The New York Times

      There are seeds of something funny in the film's beginning and in its premise, but they are soon dissipated by so little sustained wit, and so much scenery.
    • 30

      Variety

      Spies is not very amusing. Though Chase and Aykroyd provide moments, the overall script thinly takes on eccentric espionage and nuclear madness, with nothing new to add.
    • 30

      Newsweek

      Spies Like Us does have a few yuks, or at least yukettes, but there's only a semi-smidgeon of inventiveness in this ponderous farce. [16 Dec 1985, p.84]
    • 25

      TV Guide Magazine

      Landis' direction is indulgent, to say the least, with big landscapes, big crashes, big hardware, and big gags filling the screen. What he forgets is character development, that all-important factor that must exist for comedy to work well.
    • 25

      Chicago Reader

      Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire.
    • 20

      Time Out London

      Sadly, the script is so patchy that most of the genuine laughs are squeezed into the first half; the rest is a rather tacky and confused extended joke about the nuclear arms race, which is tasteless only because it fails to be funny.

    Seen by

    • Kubrickfan51