I fully expected to totally hate this movie, but Eddie Murphy managed to be charming enough to keep it pretty watchable. It’s still mostly a predictable rehash of the previous films, and it has some ridiculous plotholes and tropes, like:

• A character saying “I just have to do one more thing” and then getting caught so Axel has to figure things out, instead of that character doing the sensible thing and saying “I’m going to [list of planned actions and reasons].”
• A character gets a key piece of evidence that they could easily make copies of and/or put online, but they just hide it so there’s something everyone has to find.
• Axel and pals spend the whole movie stealing things and killing people, but everyone’s cool because it was in pursuit of justice. “Death and destruction? SOUNDS LIKE FOLEY’S ON THE CASE! HA HA HA HA!”

But it was a good movie to have on in the background while I was packing. No attention required.

I saw Used Cars a few months ago, and I was sad to realize it was a dated comedy, full of racism, sexism, and homophobia, with very few jokes that still worked. I am happy to report that Top Secret! is a movie full of jokes that mostly still work, with very almost no racism, sexism, or homophobia. Bonus: even though I’ve seen it several times before, it’s so packed with ridiculous jokes that my brain had forgotten a ton of them. And the jokes I did remember mostly managed to still land (the disguise to sneak into the prison is inspired).

All I knew about this movie when I bought the ticket was it was one of a billion Bruce Lee movies that tried to cash in after he died. Then it started, and I realized that this wasn’t just any Bruce Lee knockoff- this was the movie where Bruce Lee goes to purgatory and fights James Bond- and Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and Caine from Kung Fu, and the One-Armed Swordsman, and Dracula, and Popeye??? That would have been weird enough, but Alamo decided to make it a little more interesting by playing the Spanish dub without subtitles. I don’t speak Spanish, and I think that helped.

Also appearing: The Godfather and Emmanuel (as played by “Jenny, Emmanuel of N. Europe”).

Please enjoy this trailer and try and imagine an entire movie of this. Also, imagine it in Spanish.

First, the milestone: According to Letterboxd, this was my 100th movie of the year. However, it counts shorts as films, and I’ve seen a bunch of those. It also counts each repeat viewing, and I had a couple of those. The actual number of full-length movies I’ve seen at least once this year is closer to 80, and the number of full-length films I had never seen before this year is around 75. Still: Close enough to celebrate. Yay for too much time at the movies!

As for the movie: It’s fine. Lupita Nyong’o is wonderful as usual, but she can’t do anything about the inescapable challenges of making the third film in a franchise (particularly a sequel). It can’t just rehash the first movie, but it can’t add anything that contradicts it. So we get new “secret” facts about the creatures and how the government responded to the noise monsters. Some of them make sense, but others make it hard to understand why they couldn’t actually solve the problem. Here’s the solution I came up with:

Also, maybe cats are magical?

If you make a movie that is almost entirely a cabbie talking to a fare as they drive from the airport to her apartment, your characters had better be enthralling. Dakota Johnson is right in her lane: guarded and aloof at first, and gradually exposing herself. Sean Penn is a little too far into the “Hey, I’m a New Yawk cabbie here! How ’bout dat?” mode. Also, he’s Sean Penn.

Also, if you’re planning to see this: it’s all talk, there are no dramatic special effects, and 99% of it is inside the cab, so there’s no burning need to see it in a theater.

This movie would have benefited from some editing (I didn’t need to watch a static closeup shot of an entire microwave cooking cycle), but there are also a lot of lingering shots that work, particularly when hanging on Zoe Zeigler’s face. I don’t know if she’s a master of subtle emotion or a perfect example of the Kuleshov Effect, but every scene with her is filled with an undercurrent of emotion.

If you made this movie now the lesbian part would almost be an incidental part of the story, but in 1994 it was pretty uncommon. The acting is pretty stiff; almost all of the cast never acted before or since. The numerous sex scenes might have been groundbreaking at the time, but now they seem overlong. There’s also a little too much Freshly Graduated Film Student Artiness (“Play it backward! Throw it some symbolic shots! Add a fantasy scene with everyone wearing the same wedding dress!”). A lot of this is just a product of when it was created. If it were made with current movie equipment, they would have been able to see what shots didn’t work and reshoot immediately without worrying about running out of film. But even with all that, Go Fish is still very watchable.

This movie shouldn’t work. The main family is played by an actual family, so the risk of nepotism is high. The story is full of perfect coincidences, including: the father, a construction worker, accidentally stumbles into acting in a community theater performing exactly the right play to act as therapy; the daughter gets suspended at just the right time to participate; the mother has connections to help as well; the twin climaxes of the story happen to be occurring withing a few hours of each other. But it does work. The performances are strong enough to support the ridiculous amount of suspension of disbelief required by the story.

The father and daughter get most of the meat of the story, and they both shine. I would not be surprised if Katherine Mallen Kupferer has a long and well-respected acting career.