Police Academy (1984)
Here is your quick test for whether Police Academy is going to work for you: Michael Winslow opens his mouth and out comes a full arsenal of gunfire, sirens, squealing tyres and revving engines, entirely from his own vocal cords, without a sound effect in sight. If that makes you grin, you are in. If it makes you wince, you might as well call it a night and put something else on. That is genuinely all you need to know.
Hugh Wilson's 1984 comedy rounds up a platoon of misfits, chancers and oddballs who sign up when a new mayor throws the academy doors open to all comers, and then turns them loose on the whole idea of law and order. It is broad, daft and entirely unbothered about being either. There is no great ambition here, no satirical edge being sharpened behind the slapstick. It just wants to make you laugh, and more often than not, it does.
I will put my hands up: I have a weakness for this strain of rowdy American ensemble comedy. I have already reviewed and enjoyed both Airplane! and Scary Movie, and Police Academy sits neatly between them on the timeline. Gags first, plot a distant second, dignity nowhere in sight. You can see its fingerprints on a great deal of what followed, and I would happily believe it helped point the way toward the spoof boom that carried Scary Movie to a small fortune years later. It is also a useful reminder of how this sort of anything-for-a-laugh picture used to look before the parody merchants properly took over and started cannibalising their own genre.
Time has not been uniformly kind to it, I should say. A fair amount is dated, some of the humour creaks in ways that are hard to overlook, and anyone arriving in search of something with a bit of substance will leave empty-handed. The plot exists mainly as scaffolding to hang jokes on, and the characters are less people than they are comic functions: the big quiet one, the tiny loud one, the incredibly tall one, the man who can apparently replicate the entire sound design of an action film using only his face. Hugh Wilson is not interested in complicating any of that, and honestly fair enough.
What saves it, and keeps it afloat even when the material wobbles, is the sheer goodwill of the thing. It is not mean-spirited. The misfits are the heroes, the pompous are the targets, and the film is on the side of anyone who has ever been told they do not quite fit the mould. There is something almost quietly cheerful about that, buried under all the chaos. And there are moments here, a couple of bits involving Winslow in particular, that got a proper laugh out of me despite myself, which is about the best recommendation I can give a thirty-something-year-old studio comedy.
Taken purely for what it is: a silly, good-natured knockabout to stick on when you want to switch your brain off and let someone else do the heavy lifting. It still earns its keep. I would not hold it up alongside something like Big Trouble in Little China, which managed to be just as daft but with a bit more personality baked in, but then they are doing slightly different things.
Three stars. Outdated, thoroughly silly, and occasionally a bit creaky round the edges. But decent fun when you are in the right frame of mind for it, and Winslow alone is worth five minutes of anyone's time.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1984 | Watched: 2026-09-06
Where to watch
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