Reno 911! : Miami

Review by Clint Morris

Going to see a film spin-off of a TV series you’ve never seen is like joining a sports team mid-way through the season, so was I glad to discover that Reno 911: Miami was no less a remake of Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach!

That’s a joke, but I’m not far off the mark. You see, the feature film spawn of the Comedy Central’s COP spoof is about as original as casting Dennis Hopper in a direct-to-video action movie – and near just as entertaining; but not quite.

The film fixes on a rag-tag team of Reno cops who are called in to save the day after a terrorist attack disrupts a national police convention in Miami Beach during spring break. Naturally, they screw things up.

The main problem with Reno 911!: Miami isn’t so much that it (and the series it's based on) is merely a series of unused scenes from bad Police Academy sequels (or an amalgamation of unfilmed sequences from Broken Lizard’s Super Troopers – of which this shares many similarities; sans the ‘its funny’ part), but the more so the fact that there’s just nothing in it. It’s as hollow as a toilet roll. The jokes are flat; the performances aren’t that amusing and it’s all seemingly been put together so fast-and-on-the-fly that nobodies bothered to wait till they ‘came up with a good one’.

The bad news is, the film didn’t make a hell of a lot but it did quadruple it’s $10 million dollar budget, so chances are you’ll be seeing this unfunny bunch of officers back on the beat real soon.

1 out of 5

Reno 911! : Miami
Australian release: 17th May, 2007
Cast: Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, Niecy Nash, Mary Birdsong, Cedric Yarbrough
Director: Robert Ben Garant
Website: Click here.