Like it our not, Spy Hard at least in part will go down in history as the first film written by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who where 2 of the 4 writers on board, who will go down in history for their infamous spoofs Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie and more recently The Starving Games (watching the trailer was enough for me) which parody sometimes the genre there meant to be but whatever's popular in pop culture at the moment - "Miley Cyrus" and "Amy Winehouse" have appeared - and their film parodies are often what they call shallow parodies, many people put them below Uwe Boll in the crimes against cinema list.
So what is a film like that people saw before Friedberg and Seltzer where known as the Antichrists - well looking back now there's references to films of the mid-90s but the year they pool the references is a bit wider (years wise) then some of there later stuff - there's parodies of Speed, Home Alone, Sister Act and In The Line Of Fire - among others and the movies spoofs James Bond obviously, which is weird because Bond is a film that never took itself too seriously.
Spy Hard is a mix of comedy that is funny at times but then plenty of jokes can be seen a mile off, you can tell they tried to do what worked for Naked Gun or Airplane among others but the writing just isn't up to ZAZ quality, Leslie Nielsen a veteran of them movies is obviously a plus playing the role serious and it's hard to dislike a spoof if he's the one doing it.
I think my opinion when I first saw it did as a spy spoof that was until Austin Powers came along which was gut bustingly funny (which obviously didn't know was coming at the time).
Overall Friedberg and Seltzer hadn't developed the bad habits (for films that continued to be bewilderingly successful) so this is better then that pact (save the next film they wrote for Scary Movie) and the groans to laugh ratio way outweighs any of them.
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