I gotta admit, ladies and gentlemen, I don't really find this stuff amusing anymore, but for some reason the Police Academy movies are still their own brand of fun. I was just reading through some of the message boards about the movies on the IMDb about what peoples' favorite scenes were from part 3 and from the series as a whole, and not one of the scenes mentioned was genuinely funny to me anymore. I remember when I was a kid I loved the movies unconditionally and used to drive my brother insane because I always wanted to watch them, but I can't really remember if I just found the movies fun or if I actually got some good belly laughs out of them. Regardless, the vast majority of the comedy has not dated well, but they are still an amusing romp through the hilarious clothing and comedy styles of the 80s!
This time around, Commandant Lassard finds himself in a bit of a moment of crisis as the governor decides that it is no longer financially reasonable to maintain two police academies (the other one headed by the beloved Lieutenant Mauser from part 2), and so one of them will have to be closed. Which academy will be closed depends on performances during a period of observation by an evaluation team.
Needless to say, Mauser employs the help of the hilariously idiotic Proctor and the same two goon cadets, Copeland and Blanks, who have been employed by both Mauser and Harris to create problems for our cast of heroes since the first movie. In order to save Lassard's academy, and their own beloved alma mater, from being closed, all of our favorite Police Academy cast members have been brought back from Their First Assignment to become instructors at the academy and ensure that the place looks good.
So there you have the setup and the basic plot, and other than that it's essentially exactly the same movie as the first two. The characters are the same, the music's the same, the good guys and bad guys are the same, just the skits are different and this time we have the addition of a few negligible characters, the token geek (Sweetchuck), the token Japanese guy (who really serves no other purpose than to grin like an imbecile and become mesmerized by Callahan's prodigious bosoms), and also the ridiculous additions to the force of Fackler's nutty wife and Tackleberry's nutty brother-in-law. You know, the guy who is always trading punches with his own father. Can you imagine putting a police uniform on such a man? Only in a Police Academy movie!
There is not really anything of special note that happens during the movie, although it is a little revealing that this is arguably the funniest installment in the entire series. In keeping with the two preceding movies, we are introduced to the characters in the same way, by glimpsing them in their current lives before the needs of a new movie call them back to the Police Academy world. Hightower is dressing up as an old woman in order to catch purse snatchers in the park, Tackleberry is playing safari in the backyard with his brother-in-law, Fackler is trying to prevent his wife from joining the force (in a scene eerily reminiscent of his first scene in the original movie), and Mahoney is a
women's basketball coach?
Whatever, it doesn't matter what they're doing, their current occupations or pastimes or whatever are just little jokes as they're introduced into the movie. Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine a time when Mahoney's constant flirtations were not as purely creepy as they are now. And that mischievous grin he gets when he's about to play a trick on someone. I need a lot of beers before that's funny, although I would be lying if I said the Police Academies aren't a lot of fun after the beer count enters the double digits.
Unfortunately, there is also a definite feeling that in this installment the movie has turned into even more of a series of goofy jokes. Of course, the whole series is a bunch of goofy jokes, but I think that the second sequel is the first time when the characters that we know are used to throw in some moronic sight gags in order to get a cheap laugh, like when Tackleberry pulls out his gun and shoots a payphone because the operator refuses to relinquish her quarter, or Proctor getting locked out in the hallway ass-naked by a prostitute. On the other hand, my beer count was getting up there by this point, so I found both scenes to be pretty funny.
It is important to realize that director Jerry Paris developed most of his directing experience on television comedy series, which may have something to do with the, ah, conspicuous lack of subtlety in a lot of the sight gags in Police Academy 2 and 3. It's interesting to consider the impact that his personal directing experience before coming into the Police Academy series may have shaped the series as a whole, which moved in that direction and then never managed to get away from it. Ad now it seems that Steve Guttenberg is attempting to put a Police Academy 8 in motion, in which case I can only hope that he doesn't try to reinvent the series, although I have a feeling that it would take nothing less than a total reinvention to make yet another sequel worthwhile
