David Zucker takes over from Jim Abrahams as director of the Airplane! team's comedy films, and the result is a laugh drought that may have fans screaming for half-an-hour of TV sitcom. The jokes are mostly elaborately telegraphed and clumsily executed; most of them will make you wince, grimace or pull any expression other than a smile. Leslie Nielsen heads an all-too-undistinguished cast as a cop on the trail of a mob kingpin (Ricardo Montalban); he could have hit him over the head with a sledgehammer - it would have been well in keeping with the tenor of these disastrously unfunny proceedings. The Queen of England somehow gets dragged into the largely humourless affair that follows, but certainly to no-one's advantage. One funny gag: when the outline of a corpse is drawn on water at a murder scene; every cloud has a silver lining. Best to wait, though, for the much funnier sequels.

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