Police Academy 3: Back in Training Combines the Best of the Original with the Standouts from the Sequel

I actually kind of liked this one, surprisingly

When I was ten years old, my dad worked as a real estate broker at Coldwell Banker. I used to accompany him to the mall where he worked and see whatever child-friendly movie was playing at the mall’s movie theater.

I saw a lot of great, memorable movies during this time, which I remember fondly, if fuzzily, like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. I also saw Police Academy 3: Back in Training during this time.

I was a fourth grader when I saw Police Academy’s second sequel, so it is understandable that the only thing I remember from it was the indelible image of a cartoonishly Japanese cadet staring at a sexy blonde instructor’s enormous breasts in a tight t-shirt. It’s the kind of memory that Marcel Proust wrote about.

So, if I had a much more positive response to Police Academy 3: Back in Training than I anticipated, that is in no small part due to my tremendous nostalgia for this time in my life and in pop culture. 

As the subtitle suggests, Police Academy 3: Back in Training finds the kooky cadets of Commandant Eric Lassard’s Academy returning to help save the institution from closure due to budget cuts. 

The blockbuster second sequel to the surprise smash finds the slobs at Lassard’s Academy squaring off against the sycophantic forces of the sniveling Colonel Mauser to determine which academy will stay open and which will close forever. 

This is the third Police Academy movie I have written up, and the gang has only had one assignment so far. Oh well. The film series is called Police Academy, after all, not Police Academy Graduates. 

Since the first two movies all grossed over one hundred million dollars, why mess with a winning formula?

Writing glowingly of movies like this and the early Ernest P. Worrell films makes me feel like the movie-mad goobers of Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s On Cinema, where the comic conceit is that they love every movie no matter how terrible. 

As a proud reverse snob I do not feel guilty conceding that Police Academy 3: Back in Training resonated with me for reasons that go beyond childhood nostalgia. 

The worst Police Academy movie so far is the original blockbuster because it is desperately unfunny but also because it’s smutty and mean-spirited in a way that spoils the fun. 

Downgrading from a hard R to a family-friendly PG-13 proved a smart move, creatively as well as commercially. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and Police Academy 3: Back in Training have a genial air of likability missing from the mean-spirited original. 

Police Academy 3: Back in Training combines the strengths of the original film with scene-stealers from the sequel. 

The winning comedy team of Bobcat Goldthwait and Tim Kazurinsky return as, respectively, Cadet Zed McGlunk and Cadet Carl Sweetchuck. They’re new recruits cursed to be roommates as well as trainees. In his wonderfully self-deprecating stand-up, Goldthwait talks hilariously about the trauma of being a great satirist best known as the screaming guy from the Police Academy sequels. 

Goldthwait spends much of his time onscreen screaming. He’s a feral, often sub-verbal man-beast overflowing with oddball aggression, and consequently the perfect comic foil for Tim Kazurinsky’s diminutive doofus. 

Sweetchuck is the very image of mousy propriety. Zed is a rage-filled beast of a man. They’re the perfect pairing of opposites. Unsurprisingly, these brilliant comic minds went on to become good friends. 

The money truck backed up into his driveway, so Steve Guttenberg, who was a pretty big star by this point, returns as Officer Mahoney, a slick Bill Murray type who wields sarcasm like a switchblade. 

Bubba Smith was savvy enough to ask for a percentage of the gross to return in Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment in lieu of a salary. That was smart, considering how much the original made. 

He apparently made more money off Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment than he did during his entire NFL career combined. Smith unsurprisingly returns for more as  Moses Hightower, a large, powerful man who can throw things far. That’s pretty much all there is to the character: he’s big and strong, and that’s about it. 

But the most important returning figure was, of course, the legendary Guy From The Police Academy Movies Who Makes The Funny Noises With His Mouth. You can’t have a Police Academy movie without The Guy From The Police Academy Movies Who Makes The Funny Noises With His Mouth. 

When I worked at The Onion in the 1990s, The Guy From The Police Academy Movies Who Makes The Funny Noises With His Mouth was named Man of the Year. In homage, I vowed never to refer to this uniquely gifted performer by his real name.

The Guy From The Police Academy Movies Who Makes The Funny Noises With His Mouth is an inveterate scene-stealer whose shtick never gets old or wears out its welcome because the film understands that his act works best in short bursts. 

Police Academy 3: Back in Training was released in 1986, the year of Gung Ho, when our country was obsessed with the Japanese as socially awkward, geeky rivals whose economic super-genius would destroy us economically. 

So one of the cadets is Brian Tochi as Cadet Tomoko Nogata. Being Japanese isn’t just this unusual exchange student’s ethnicity; it’s his whole personality. He’s a glib caricature of an inscrutable yet comic man from the East who sleeps on a bed of nails and is predictably proficient in martial arts. 

David Graf re-ups as Tackleberry, a gonzo parody of Dirty Harry/Rambo-style butt kickers who shoot first and never bother asking questions. 

George Gaynes returns as the Lassard, the white-haired, twinkly-eyed head of the Police Academy. In the first film, Lassard was a little fuzzy-headed but generally competent. His IQ and capabilities drop precipitously with each successive film. In Police Academy 3: Back in Training, he’s a dithering idiot who barely seems to know where he is or even who he is much of the time. 

Gaynes was, of course, a beloved fixture of stage and screen and a veteran performer with crackerjack comic timing. Even more than Mahoney, who would bolt after just four films, Lassard is the backbone of this deliciously idiotic series. 

Commandant Ernie Mauser and his men fight dirty in their bid to win the all-important competition, but Lassard’s boys have some tricks up their sleeves as well. 

Police Academy 3: Back in Training brings back such beloved staples of the franchise as the prostitute who performed oral sex on Lassard without his knowledge or consent and the gay leather bar that hosts all manner of gay panic gags. 

There’s even a climactic jet-ski chase that had me first thinking, “Sweet! A jet-ski chase! How wonderfully 1980s,” and then, “Jesus Christ, will this jet-ski chase ever end?” 

Police Academy 3: Back in Training is eighty painless minutes of moderately amusing, broad slapstick comedy from a cast full of ringers and wonderful human oddities. Did I laugh a lot while watching? No, but I did find the whole thing relatively diverting. 

For a movie like this, that qualifies as rapturous praise.