Kyle Jobin’s review published on Letterboxd:
"How could you do something so vicious?"
"It was easy my dear. You forget, I spent two years as a building contractor."
Have to salute ZAZ for not giving up on "Police Squad!" after it flopped hard on its first and only season (if you haven't seen the few episodes that actually got produced, do yourself and seek them out. Television comedy never got much better than that). They parlay that straight hardboiled detective formula that probably confused TV viewers looking for programmed cues from canned laughter to this big screen adaptation and it sharply enhances the effectiveness of the gags ("She was giving me a look I could feel in my hip pocket." "Bingo..."). Old pros Leslie Nielsen, George Kennedy, Nancy Marchand ("You killed five actors! Good ones!"), Ricardo Montalban (that he can utter the name "Pahpshmir" w/out flinching is a testament to the towering scale of his craft), and a glorious cameo from John Houseman sending up the role for which he won an Oscar ("Extend your middle finger...") sell the broad goofery w/ expert aplomb. Priscilla Presley also surprises w/ how magnetic her screen presence is and her chemistry w/ Nielsen is appealingly off the charts ("Nice beaver!" "Thanks! I just had it stuffed"). The final third of the runtime remains the greatest big screen baseball picture to date (from Dr. Joyce Brothers in the broadcast booth to the postal worker being moved enough to warmly embrace a suddenly-friendly dog, the comedy is so genuinely inspired here). My favorite sequence remains the date montage where Frank and Jane leave the screening of "Platoon" laughing hysterically. That this picture can retain any of its overall spirit of fun in the shadow of O.J. (introduced here sneaking around in the dark wearing a stocking cap, no less), speaks to the success rate of the filmmaking team's go-for-broke style of writing (and also invites a level of virtue to the gleeful violence of Warner Bros. cartoons which inspired the many elaborate, uproarious reckonings of the football hero/actor/murderer depicted here [my favorite's still the wet paint stain]). A deceptively simple slapstick classic.
