Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989) Warner Bros./Comedy RT: 84 minutes Rated PG (language, comic violence) Director: Peter Bonerz Screenplay: Stephen J. Curwick Music: Robert Folk Cinematography: Charles Rosher Jr. Release date: March 10, 1989 (US) Cast: Bubba Smith, David Graf, Michael Winslow, Marion Ramsey, Leslie Easterbrook, Bruce Mahler, Matt McCoy, G.W. Bailey, Lance Kinsey, George Gaynes, George R. Robertson, Gerrit Graham, Brian Seeman, Darwyn Swalve, Kenneth Mars, Billie Bird, Arthur Batanides, Beans Morocco, Alan Hunter, Mark Jay Goodman, Melle Mel (as Melvin Glover), Allison Mack. Box Office: $11.5 million (US)
Rating: *
And the series continues its decline with Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, a boring and unfunny piece that has Cmndt. Lassard (Gaynes) and his pals attempting to stop a crime wave that’s been plaguing one area of the city. As usual, I saw it opening night, this time with my brother and a friend (Dad skipped this one, a wise decision). We all agreed that they should have quit while they were a little bit ahead.
At this point, everybody in the cast looks like they’ve had enough of this foolishness. It’s clear that they’re all bored and probably only agreed to do a sixth movie to fulfill their contracts. That’s just one theory. I have one of my own. Producer Paul Maslansky employed the services of SNL hypnotist The Amazing Alexander (“I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats. I want to see it again and again.”) to work his magic on the actors. That would explain the dazed expressions on some of their faces. Either way, Police Academy 6 is a bad movie.
Director Peter Bonerz (The Bob Newhart Show) is so desperate for laughs that he even has human sound effects machine Winslow perform a few minutes of his stand-up routine in one scene. When the director has to resort to that, you know the movie is in serious trouble. Even the return of accident prone Sgt. Fackler (Mahler) doesn’t help. He seems more bored by than oblivious of the path of destruction he leaves in his wake.
In this installment, the Mayor (Mars, The Producers) and Commissioner Hurst (Robertson) call in Lassard and his team after Captain Harris (Bailey) and flunky Lt. Proctor (Kinsey) botch up a stakeout in a big way. Harris doesn’t like this one bit because he finally managed to get transferred out of the academy and away from Lassard and his men (and women)- Hightower (Smith), Tackleberry (Graf), Jones (Winslow), Hooks (Ramsey), Callahan (Easterbrook) and Nick Lassard (McCoy) who presumably transferred from Miami. There’s a guy in serious need to career advice. Why leave a nice place like Miami for a crime-ridden place like ….. oh, who knows?
What’s happening is a trio of inept crooks- leader Ace (Graham, Used Cars), agile Flash (Seeman) and hulking Ox (Swalve, Heartbreak Ridge)- are robbing various establishments in this one part of town and nobody can get a line on them. It turns out that they’re just hired help, working for an anonymous criminal mastermind who keeps his identity concealed. It seems like this guy is always one step ahead of the police and it’s deduced that somebody closely involved with the investigation is leaking information to the unknown person. What’s it all about? What’s the end game? I’ll tell you. It’s a huge real estate scam that has to do with a new rail line about to undergo construction. Who’s the mastermind? That I won’t tell you, but you can figure it out by process of elimination.
Bonerz gets so desperate that he even utilizes a Mission Impossible trick when the cops finally unmask (literally) the perpetrator. I half-expected this person to say that he would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for these meddling cops. As for its comedic value, I didn’t laugh, I didn’t cry, but I did chuckle once, when Jones does sort of a Terminator imitation during a fight with one of the crooks using scrap metal from a junkyard.
Police Academy 6 ends with a city-wide blackout in which the cops have to stop citizens from looting and rioting while trying to catch the bad guys. As usual, Harris comes out looking like an ass.
I realize that the Police Academy flicks are all essentially the same movie, but there are usually a few laughs (empty though they may be) to be had. Usually. That’s not the case with Police Academy 6 which is so utterly lifeless that even the pranks played on Harris (one involving a dye pack at a bank) fail to elicit laughs. McCoy seems like he’s trying to fill Guttenberg’s shoes, but he doesn’t quite cut it. I usually like Graham, but he also does nothing for the movie. And was Mars that desperate for work that he agreed to play such a dumb character? His performance is just embarrassing. It’s like Bonerz is begging audiences to laugh at Police Academy 6 despite the fact it comes up short in pretty much every area. The scene where Harris and Proctor go undercover as skyscraper window-washers ends exactly as you’d expect, with one of them hanging upside down from the scaffold and the other with his pants down. This movie is a clear case of arrested development.
