Spies Like Us

A double act with Chase and Aykroyd playing US State Department misfits whose gross bad behaviour during an informal exam leads them into hurried training for a deadly mission in Soviet-controlled Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sadly, the script is so patchy that most of the genuine laughs are squeezed into the first half; the rest is a rather tacky and confused extended joke about the nuclear arms race, which is tasteless only because it fails to be funny. There are token guest slots for the likes of Bob Hope, BB King, and a whole string of film-makers from Ray Harryhausen and Larry Cohen to Costa-Gavras and Michael Apted.