Spaceballs

Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do.

If it isn't likely to generate what Mr. Brooks himself refers to as 'Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money, neither is it anything less than gentle, harmless satire that occasionally has real bite.

It probably will do fairly well with kids and younger adolescents, who haven't heard the bad puns and seen the sight gags a thousand times before.

Parts of it work wonderfully, but whole stretches flounder.

One gropes in vain to find substantial pleasures in Spaceballs. The film is basically an empty wasteful retread of the self-conscious approach that seemed so fresh 13 years ago in Blazing Saddles.

No one is that interested in Star Wars anymore. So watching Spaceballs is like picking up an old copy of Mad magazine and being puzzled about that Jack Palance parody you found so funny years ago.

This sendup by director Mel Brooks incorporates the silliest aspects of all the major space adventures of the last decade, and the whole is a hilarious combination of its parts.

Spaceballs doesn’t aspire to art; it’s perfectly happy to provide at least two good laughs every minute. That’s not a bad batting average.

It is with a great deal of pleasure that I inform you that Spaceballs is twice as funny as the title and that it is funny from blast-off to splashdown.

Although the film is "just" a parody, it's a well-done takeoff. Even the camera shots parody the other films it spoofs, and the special effects are excellent. So go space out. And may the farce be with you.