Spaceballs: The Review
Chicago Reader
Spaceballs
Capsule by Pat
Graham
From the Chicago Reader
Leave it to Mel Brooks to be ten
years behind times with his broad genre spoofs (Blazing Saddles, High
Anxiety, etc). This Brooks-directed send-up (1987) scours the Star
Wars saga for signs of comic life, though Brooks's main parodistic targets
are the merchandising spin-offs that surround the series. Brooks seems genuinely
exercised by the crassness of it all (a pot-and-kettle irritation, it seems to
me), which makes the humor more irascibly lumpy than usual (is that really
possible?) but also a bit more personal: for once he's not the indiscriminate,
uncommitted jokester, and some things are evidently worthier game than others.
The film's decidedly low-tech styling makes it the antithesis of the grand
cinematic machines it parodies, and Brooks seems less inclined than usual to
push his overkill urges too far. Small compensations, I guess, but at least it's
not the total washout you'd expect. With Bill Pullman and John Candy (spaceniks
on the side of light), Daphne Zuniga (as a runaway princess: she's more
generously treated than the usual Brooks bimbo, and repays the attention with
some reasonably shaded work), Rick Moranis (a diminutive Darth Vader villain),
and Brooks himself in a double role.