amyghost
but there are some very funny bits in this: Rik Mayall's manic SAS agent, Ian Richardson's Rear Admiral Bendish (you may need some familiarity with British slang to get the joke, but it's made clear soon enough), the incomparable Peter Cook's crazed Prime Minister and several other performances lend this sometimes fairly juvenile outing a good deal more comedic mileage than it probably would have gotten from a less talented cast. The ending does come close to ranking up there as a bit of a classic, and overall it's a pretty entertaining piece of silliness. It's not going to knock 'Dr. Strangelove' off of any pedestals for stinging anti-war satire, but it does supply some genuine laughs.Michael Richards' portrayal of Lacrobat can't come close to John Cleese's handling of the role in the 1982 television series, but he gets some amusing business in; and the somewhat oddly cast Loretta Swit does a better job with her role as President Adams than might have been expected.
spanishflea50
One can always tell an excellent film if the opening credits make one guffaw ("The British partitioned the Island and took for themselves the upstairs rooms, fighting soon broke out of several mezzanines")and although the film wasn't quite Python it certainly had moments that made me snort my drink. The film did have a tendency to feel like a series of sketches but none the less Peter Cook's insane (although rather charismatic) Prime Minister is worth the purchase price alone. It was also some of the minor characters that provided some of the best laughs such as the former US president (looking the spitting image of Donald Rumsfeld) turned convict who published his memoirs "Commie Bastards I knew".All in all an underrated classic
Phil Davison
What an utter disappointment. Forget this abysmal film and get hold of the TV series instead. What on earth were they doing making the American president relatively sane? ALL the politicians should have been bumbling buffoons (Peter Cook is good as the British PM). It lacks the biting satire of the original, going instead for "lowest common denominator" slapstick. 1 out of 10 if I'm being generous! This is unfortunately yet another example of a remake which totally misses the point of the original, the difference with this one being that they were both written by the same people.
Penfold-13
There's a genre of spy thriller which involves Presidents, Prime Ministers and other heads of government, top police and spymasters, an assassin like Carlos the Jackal, and the imminent outbreak of WWIII. Whoops Apocalypse is one of those.Just as Airplane is a disaster movie.Not that Whoops Apocalypse is as funny as Airplane - there are too many scenes when the plot advances in a reasonably pointful fashion for that - but there are some inspired spoof scenes. There's a beautiful one when the Navy Officer gets his orders to report to his ship by nightfall - there are reasons why this isn't quite as poignant as the similar scenes in b&w 1942 movies.Some bits of it may well seem inexplicable unless you remember that it was made in Britain in 1986, with the Falklands War still fairly fresh in people's minds, Di-mania a-booming, and Margaret Thatcher still running the country in demented fashion.The highlight of the film is Peter Cook's portrayal of Prime Minister Sir Mortimer Chris: a high-powered Sir Bufton Tufton, fearfully right-wing and, as we discover, stark staring bonkers. Loretta Swit plays the US President a la Carol Channing, and a number of others kick in with decent cameos.I'd like to see it again, to find out whether I got all the jokes the first time round - Airplane must have taken a dozen viewings before I'd spotted some of the really subtle touches. I suspect there is less to discover in this second and third time round, but it's not a bad attempt, overall.
AD
