Spoof movies have had it rough in the last twenty years. You can probably blame the Scary Movie franchise for a lot of that but they have some residual entertainment value, especially the first and underrated third one and to be perfectly fair and honest the genre had long run its course by the time we narrowly escaped the apocalypse of Y2K only to face a more terrifying foe in Windows ME.
The all-time classics by the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team and some of its cohorts like Pat Proft's Hot Shots movies still hold up magnificently, but by the time Loaded Weapon 1 hit screens in 1993 the ZAZ style spoofs were already in a big slump. Once you reach Silence of the hams and late career Leslie Nielsen (we still miss you though oh magnificent one) you're in the swampiest of swamps and looking at the cover and prestigious national lampoons branding you'd be forgiven for putting Loaded Weapon 1 in the same category and dismissing it altogether. You'd be missing out on some solid fun though.
The main target for this spoof are of course the Lethal Weapon movies, that started off strong only to get increasingly ridiculous. Your surrogate Gibson/Glover team is played by Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson, or as he was known before Pulp Fiction "some guy". The casting is surprisingly strong given the low brow material. There's Whoopi Goldberg, Tim Curry, F. Murray Abraham, William Shatner with a fantastic moustache, countless cameos you wouldn't expect in a movie like this which makes Loaded Weapon stand out amongst its peers. Estevez and Jackson have some good chemistry but it's very apparent Estevez has much better comedic timing. It's really strange looking back now that he was probably better known and regarded than Sam Jackson at the time.
In contrast to the lesser spoofs this one mostly stays on topic working the Lethal Weapon tropes into its jokes and storyline and oddly enough coming off almost restrained compared to many more ludicrous moments in that movie's sequels. There are also nods to Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct that are riding the line and a few timely references that feel obscure now at best, dated at worst. The big problem with this genre of parody is that they steadily ran out of material in the movies they were mocking, thus necessitating the need to adopt an everything but the kitchen sink approach to writing that made the films ultimately less coherent, clever and most importantly funny. Airplane was a parody of 50s and 60s catastrophe movies like the Airport series, Naked Gun was a parody of police procedurals with hints of film noir, they are insane and surreal but they are extremely precise in their writing and their genre tropes. Once you lose that precision your movie starts to fall apart which happens a little with Loaded Weapon as well as the later plague of random nonsense non-sequiturs rears its ugly head a bit too often.
Generally the jokes are a bit low brow, but I can't pretend they didn't make me laugh still. It's definitely a lesser parody movie that doesn't hold up quite as well to repeat viewings as the classics but it's also nowhere near the worst exemplars from the later half of the nineties or god forbid the unholy post-Scary Movie nuclear wasteland of the twin-headed monstrosity Friedberg and Seltzer. An enjoyable romp with an intensely likeable cast and surprisingly solid soundtrack, but you can already see the cracks quite clearly that lead to the death of the spoof movie.
The all-time classics by the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team and some of its cohorts like Pat Proft's Hot Shots movies still hold up magnificently, but by the time Loaded Weapon 1 hit screens in 1993 the ZAZ style spoofs were already in a big slump. Once you reach Silence of the hams and late career Leslie Nielsen (we still miss you though oh magnificent one) you're in the swampiest of swamps and looking at the cover and prestigious national lampoons branding you'd be forgiven for putting Loaded Weapon 1 in the same category and dismissing it altogether. You'd be missing out on some solid fun though.
The main target for this spoof are of course the Lethal Weapon movies, that started off strong only to get increasingly ridiculous. Your surrogate Gibson/Glover team is played by Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson, or as he was known before Pulp Fiction "some guy". The casting is surprisingly strong given the low brow material. There's Whoopi Goldberg, Tim Curry, F. Murray Abraham, William Shatner with a fantastic moustache, countless cameos you wouldn't expect in a movie like this which makes Loaded Weapon stand out amongst its peers. Estevez and Jackson have some good chemistry but it's very apparent Estevez has much better comedic timing. It's really strange looking back now that he was probably better known and regarded than Sam Jackson at the time.
In contrast to the lesser spoofs this one mostly stays on topic working the Lethal Weapon tropes into its jokes and storyline and oddly enough coming off almost restrained compared to many more ludicrous moments in that movie's sequels. There are also nods to Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct that are riding the line and a few timely references that feel obscure now at best, dated at worst. The big problem with this genre of parody is that they steadily ran out of material in the movies they were mocking, thus necessitating the need to adopt an everything but the kitchen sink approach to writing that made the films ultimately less coherent, clever and most importantly funny. Airplane was a parody of 50s and 60s catastrophe movies like the Airport series, Naked Gun was a parody of police procedurals with hints of film noir, they are insane and surreal but they are extremely precise in their writing and their genre tropes. Once you lose that precision your movie starts to fall apart which happens a little with Loaded Weapon as well as the later plague of random nonsense non-sequiturs rears its ugly head a bit too often.
Generally the jokes are a bit low brow, but I can't pretend they didn't make me laugh still. It's definitely a lesser parody movie that doesn't hold up quite as well to repeat viewings as the classics but it's also nowhere near the worst exemplars from the later half of the nineties or god forbid the unholy post-Scary Movie nuclear wasteland of the twin-headed monstrosity Friedberg and Seltzer. An enjoyable romp with an intensely likeable cast and surprisingly solid soundtrack, but you can already see the cracks quite clearly that lead to the death of the spoof movie.