Imagine having your testicles ripped off by a Grizzly and you're half way to appreciating how painful an experience this movie is. Whatever you thought about the previous Police Academy movies (and I'm not particularly fond of any of them) they at least fitted in to the genre of comedy. This one creates it's own sub-genre: the anti-comedy. There's not a single joke in the entire film that makes any sense, and this is partly due to the fact that the script reads as though it was translated from English into Russian and then back again. And I'm not trying to insult the Russians. They get a hard enough time in the movie. If the makers of this film are to be believed, the Russian people are a humourless bunch, and so you imagine that the producers thought that a film with absolutely no humour in it would go down a storm with Moscow audiences. Now, I've never seen a Russian comedy, but I think it's safe to bet that they're better than this.
In one scene, a character batters a hole in a hotel room door using an ice bucket stuck to his head. I don't know why, and it's typical of this film that you're never quite sure what it is you're supposed to be laughing at. The jokes just rattle on and on like this making no sense whatsoever.
If you were to convince yourself that what you were actually watching was a serious drama about the mental illness of a high-ranking police officer lost in Moscow, you might get some perverse pleasure out of this. On the video packet, though, the distributors assure us that it's a comedy, so you can't even give the film the benefit of the doubt.
It's interesting to note that after the Police Academy team's adventure in Moscow, the authorities saw fit to let them back into their own country, where they went on to make Police Academy : The Series which is, believe it or not, even worse than this.
Best to watch this drunk. And with the television switched off.
