Spies Like Us

Two bumbling government employees think they are U.S. spies, only to discover that they are actually decoys for Nuclear War.

• Director: John Landis
• Genre:Comedy
• Runtime:102 minutes

Cast

Chevy Chase : Emmett Fitz-Hume
Dan Aykroyd : Austin Millbarge
Steve Forrest : General Sline
Donna Dixon : Karen Boyer
Bruce Davison : Ruby

Dan Aykroyd plays Austin Millbarge, a geekish, basement-dwelling codebreaker for the Pentagon, who aspires to escape his under-respected job to become a secret agent. Chase is Emmett Fitz-Hume, a wisecracking, pencil-pushing son of an envoy who takes the foreign service exam under peer pressure. Millbarge and Fitz-Hume meet during the test, on which Fitz-Hume is openly attempting to cheat.

Needing expendable agents to act as decoys to draw attention away from a more advanced team, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) decides to enlist the two and promote them to the ranks of GLG20, Foreign Service Operatives, and put them through minimal training, then send them on an undefined mission into Soviet Central Asia. Meanwhile, professional agents are well on their way to reaching the real objective: the overtaking of a mobile SS-50 ICBM launcher.

The main team takes a loss, leaving only Dixon’s character (Boyer), while Millbarge and Fitz-Hume miraculously escape enemy traps, attacks, and other certain perils. Eventually the bumbling pair team up with Boyer.

In the Pamir Mountains of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the team overpowers a mobile missile guard unit, and following orders in real-time from the intelligence agency (operating from a military bunker located deep under an abandoned drive-in theater), they begin to operate the launcher. At the end of their instructions, the vehicle launches the ICBM into space, targeting Detroit, Michigan. Thinking they have begun a nuclear war, the American agents and their Soviets counterparts pair up to have sex before the world ends.

Meanwhile, the military commander at the operations bunker (Steve Forrest, looking much like the similarly psychotic General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove) initiates the conversion of the drive-in theater to expose what is hidden beneath the screens and projection booth: a huge black-op “Star Wars”-esque megawatt laser and collector/emitter screen. The purpose of sending the GLG20 team to launch a Soviet ICBM is then exposed as a means to test this anti-ballistic missile system. Unfortunately, the laser fails to intercept the nuclear missile, which is heading for the U.S. and will almost certainly trigger a global thermonuclear war. In another parallel to Dr. Strangelove, the general insists they are prepared to survive underground for years “to guarantee the American way of life.” Read more

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