1994's Police Academy: Mission to Moscow Is an Outlier In Many Ways, But It Sucks Just as Hard As Most Other Entries
It's not great!
I only have four more movies to watch and then write about, and then I will be done with the research and writing of The Fractured Mirror, a 650-page magnum opus on the last century in American movies about filmmaking.
That’s exciting! As someone with a terrible tendency toward procrastination, it feels damn good to finally finish something, to be able to cross it off your to-do list forever.
On a similar note, this article will conclude a seven-part series on the Police Academy films. It’s the latest in a series of journeys through low culture that I have conducted for this newsletter. I previously wrote about the Ernest P. Worrell movies, the Fast and the Furious franchise, the Silent Night, Deadly Night saga, and film spin-offs of Saturday Night Live, a long-running live sketch comedy show based in New York.
I let paid subscribers to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas determine which franchises I write about via polls that you can participate in for just five dollars a month.
1994’s Police Academy: Mission to Moscow is an outlier. The first six Police Academy were cranked out, factory-style, yearly for an increasingly young and undiscriminating audience during the Reagan decade.
They were critical punching bags and walking punchlines, but they were also consistent moneymakers churned out on low budgets for an audience that didn’t care about quality or originality.
Police Academy: Mission to Moscow was filmed five years after the release of 1989’s Police Academy 6: City Under Siege. That may not be long for some franchises, but it is an eternity in Police Academy time. The idea was to keep cranking out the films until their target demographic hit puberty and outgrew them.
The sixth sequel to a movie that famously wasn’t any damn good in the first place is also the first entry to flee our nation’s borders for the chilly embrace of the Soviet Union. They were once our hated rivals. Now, they’re the lovable losers of global politics.
The A team is long gone. Steve Guttenberg? Hasn’t been in the series since its fourth entry. The comedy team of Bobcat Goldthwait and Tim Kazurinsky? They bowed out after Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol as well.
The B-team has similarly bounced. Matt McCoy, who occupied the Steve Guttenberg leading man role after the popular comic actor bolted, is also gone. The Steve Guttenberg/Matt McCoy role of Cadet Kyle Connors, a handsome, cocky, smartass leading man, is occupied by Charlie Schlatter. Schlatter rose to semi-fame as a poor man’s Matthew Broderick in teen peacock mode in the television adaptation of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He’s just as adequate/undistinguished here as a third-rate knockoff of a second-rate Bill Murray.
The only Police Academy movie not to receive a robust theatrical release wasn’t even able to hold onto Bubba Smith, Marion Ramsay, and Lance Kinsey, Captain Harris’ doltish sidekick.
Is a Police Academy movie even a Police Academy movie without the big guy who is very strong and can lift things and throw them large distances and the lady with the squeaky voice who sometimes gets angry even a Police Academy movie?
Steve Guttenberg, I understand. He was a big star in the 1980s. But when you can’t hold onto Marion Ramsay, it’s probably time to pack it in and concede that perhaps the Police Academy series has run its course, and it’s time to put it out of its misery.
Police Academy: Mission to Moscow inexplicably gives Schlatter’s unpromising newcomer a love interest in a Russian translator in, Katrina Sergeeva (Claire Forlani). Forlani would appear in Mallrats, The Rock and Basquiat in the next two years.
In Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, Russian Commandant Alexandrei Nikolaivich Rakov (Christopher Lee), in a terrible fit of judgment, is so impressed by George Gaynes’ impossibly idiotic Commandant Lassard that he recruits his help in taking down mafia kingpin Konstantin Konali (Ron Perlman).
Konstantin has conquered the world with a game confusingly titled The Game. The filmmakers are foolish enough to show us a game that is supposed to be the most popular and irresistible video game ever created.
Of course, Tetris was a Russian video game that conquered the world and became an international pop culture phenomenon. That’s because it was a great game, whereas The Game consists of an ostentatiously Russian protagonist walking across an empty room and sometimes interacting with bears.
The Game never rises to mediocrity, so the film’s contention that it’s the greatest in existence is distractingly implausible. If the movie had engaged me at all, that would have taken me out of Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.
Lassard and his least expensive, discriminating longtime costars travel to Russia to assist the local police in putting the big baddie in jail.
I’ve written before about the double laughter that ensues when you laugh at something objectively idiotic and then laugh at yourself for being so stupid that you find idiocy laugh-out-loud funny.
That’s how I felt at a subplot where Lassard, being the world’s biggest buffoon (but also, confusingly, a man honored as lawman of the decade in the previous film) gets into the wrong car upon arriving in Moscow.
Instead of assisting the Russians and his men in the investigation, Lassard spends his entire time in Russia with a random family that lets him just hang out.
George Gaynes handles this nonsense with trademark aplomb. He was endlessly excited and curious about life. Gaynes is the single stupidest element of Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. He’s also the funniest. His performance here is sublime and transcendent in its stupidity. The rest of the film is just stupid.
This ends the most American franchise on a sorry note. Police Academy should never have made it past the decade that defined it and that it, in turn, defined. That’s right: the 1980s are now the Police Academy decade.
This concludes my trip through the Police Academy movies. They aren’t all bad, but let’s be brutally honest; they mostly are.
Will that be true of the The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, the next series I’ll tackle for this newsletter? I have no idea. I’m trying to go in with no expectations and to be open, as ever, to wonderful surprises. I remain, as always, cautiously optimistic.
Great. Now I want to see this movie for the cop hanging out with confused Russian family subplot.
I had no idea — none! — that both Christopher Lee and Ron Perlman were in the cast of this film. Mind: boggled.
From looking at his filmography, this is situated in the period between Cronos and City of Lost Children, which I can only imagine was something of an artistic rollercoaster ride for Mr. Perlman.