STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs
Marshall Richard 'Dick' Dix (Leslie Nielsen) is an appropriately bumbling secret agent who's assigned the task of travelling to the planet Phaebon with Agent Menage (Ophelie Winter) and rescuing the president (Damien Masson) who's been kidnapped by some intergalactic villains.Cue various mishaps and comical encounters.
This Nielsen spoof was originally released in 2000,but it's arrived on these shores four years later.I would have thought there'd be a good opportunity to release it on the back of Nielsen's appearance in the theatrically released Scary Movie 3,but,alas,there you go.It's had a whole lot of bad press,consistent bad reviews and making it,at one point,to a place no lower than #20 at one point on IMDB's very own bottom 100.
I don't want to complain too much of the lengthy wait I've had to endure to watch 2001:A Space Travesty though.As captain Gilder said to Trilling in Under Siege 2,"good things come to those who wait."Also,though quite far from a good thing,2001 has not been worthy of all it's negative publicity.I'm sure if Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck had been headbilling it,it would have got a cinema release by now.
There were some very funny moments,but the rambling,increasingly predictable script made them emerge as rather few and far between.It's a bit too long as well and the plot begins to lack much in the way of cohision.The desperation is more evident with the constant bombardment of obvious and rather gratuitous sexually explicit jokes and yet another resurgence of that 'hidden birthmark' joke,stolen from Nielsen's own Naked Gun 2 and recently used in Rowan Atkinson's Johnny English.But it's a fairly slick presentation,just managing to over-shadow the see-through production values,and if it just manages to make you laugh enough,is just worth the price.And the duration.
For the title it's spoofing,though,it really doesn't send that particular film up much.And that's one of the things I was really looking forward to it for.**
