These smart movies are only pretending to be dumb movies, in order to lull you into a false sense of superiority and catch you off guard with their — dare we say it? — brilliance.
By the way, do you know what we consider a truly dumb movie? A pretentious movie that thinks it’s deep and profound. Give us an unapologetically dumb movie over a too-serious movie any day.
So with that, here are 12 smart movies disguised as dumb movies.
Starship Troopers (1997)
One could argue that most of the movies Paul Verhoeven directed in the ’80s and ’90s were smart movies disguised as dumb movies. The Dutch filmmaker blends high and low culture more successfully than almost anyone.
Case in point: At the time of its release, critics dismissed Starship Troopers as a witless sci-fi flick, missing the fact that it’s actually a satire of jingoistic warmongering.
The New York Times Janet Maslin, for example, dismissively wrote, “Where exactly are the hordes of moviegoers who will exclaim: ”Great idea! Let’s go see the one about the cute young co-ed army and the big bugs from space.'”
You could maybe understand them not understanding that Verhoeven was making a satire — if not for the fact that almost all of his movies, going back to Robocop, contain large doses of satire and social commentary. (Even the widely reviled Showgirls.)
If you watch it right — meaning, if you realize everyone involved in the movie is in on the joke — Starship Troopers is the best dumb movies ever made about a cute co-ed army and big bugs from space. But it’s also a solid movie about militarism and patriotism, in the vein of Dr. Strangelove.
The Terminator (1984)
James Cameron set out to combine high-minded sci-fi with the cheap thrills and DIY ethos of a Roger Corman movie, and ended up creating a classic.
The Terminator holds your attention with violence and shocks, but leaves you thinking, long after it’s over, about whether the robots could really take over. And its theory of time travel — in which everything is a loop — is one of the coolest of any movie.
Anyone who started the ’80s thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger was all brawn and no brains had to stand corrected by the end of the decade: He had a true gift for selecting seemingly dumb movies that gave you something to think about long after the catch phrases faded.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
Another magnificent dumb movie setup: a swingin’ 60s secret agent is thawed-out in the more reserved ’90s. But one of writer-star Mike Myers’ greatest tricks is finding comedy in the gap between what you expect his characters to know, and what they actually do know.
The Austin Powers movies have a lot of fun lovingly mocking the tropes of Bond films — the villain who gives away his whole plan, the double entendres, the disposable henchmen — but then Austin knocks you out with his surprising sensitivity and decency.
Once, around the height of #MeToo, we saw this movie at a huge outdoor screening with a crowd of mostly millennials. When Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley) tries to initiate sex with Austin, and he objects that she’s too drunk, Austin “Danger” Powers scored himself a long applause break.
Top Secret (1984)
Top Secret — from the folks who brought you Airplane! — was a bomb that felt almost like an exercise in silliness: It’s like a parody of an Elvis movie, crossed with a parody of war movie, with an extended Blue Lagoon parody thrown in. We know, it looks like a very dumb movie.
But it’s also a loving homage to decades of movie camera tricks, and some of its set pieces are sheer cinematic genius, including a scene that is shot perfectly backwards, before the movie deliberately undercuts its own very impressive blocking.
We’d also call attention to a ludicrously great underwater saloon brawl that required the actors to hold their breath for extended periods of time.
But the camera tricks are just part of its wit. It also finds room for left-field jokes like this one: “My uncle was born in America. But he was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency.”
The Running Man (1987)
Another example of Arnold Schwarzenegger choosing a role perfectly.
The Running Man, based on a Stephen King story, wisely predicted the rise of TV reality competitions. Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, a scapegoated helicopter pilot forced to compete in a series of very violent face-offs with cartoonish enemies in order to win a dystopian game show called The Running Man.
There are many nice touches here — including the casting of real-life family feud host Richard Dawson as the host of the show, Damon Killian — but the smartest thing about the movie is how Ben has to not only vanquish his foes, but also win a media war with the totalitarian government behind the game.
Robocop (1987)
If you think Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop is a dumb movie about a robotic cop who gets revenge on the bad guys, please give it another shot? It’s shockingly prescient in its presentation of a grotesque utopia in which corporations allow artificial intelligence to make life and death decisions.
We can’t think of a better summary of how drone law enforcement could go awry than the scene when the ED-209 orders a corporate drone to drop his weapon — then kills him for failing to comply, long after he complies. (In fact, we think about it every time the self-checkout at the grocery store refuses to acknowledge we placed out can of beans in the bagging area.)
One of the coolest things about Robocop is that it works as a top-notch sci-fi adventure, or as a critique of the mindless violence in some of the movies that came out at the same time.
White Chicks (2004)
This looks, on the suface, like one of the dumbest of dumb movies.: Two Black FBI agents (Marlon and Shawn Wayans) have to go undercover as a pair of privileged young white women in the Hamptons to lure a kidnapper.
But White Chicks is good! Not just for its total commitment to comedy, without caring if anyone’s offended, but also for its insights into code-switching, stereotyping, and how certain white people talk when they think no one of color is around.
Like most Wayans projects, this one works best when you embrace the silliness and let yourself be surprised by the occasional drops of wisdom.
Friday (1995)
Yes, Friday is filled with jokes about women and weed, but it also sneaks in a potent message about de-escalating violence, while still standing up for yourself.
Coming as it did after a wave of early 90s gang violence — much of it duly catalogued by Friday star and co-writer Ice Cube during his years with NWA and as a solo rapper — it offered a refreshing but thrilling conclusion in which everyone stood their ground, but no one had to die.
And it somehow did it all without ever going preachy.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
Mixing smart and stupid is the bread and butter of Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay. So while Anchorman is jam-packed with great dumb jokes — like the whole “sex panther” section (“60 percent of the time, it works every time”) — Anchorman is also a pretty great satire of bad journalism and casual workplace sexism.
The many, many great jokes clear the path for McKay and Ferrell to present a portrait of go-along-get-along mediocrity in the San Diego news scene’s old boys networks.
In Anchorman 2, they take the mediocrity national. To the point that every time we see a preening, overconfident, self-important news anchor, we think of Ron Burgundy. Time to musk up.
Josie and the Pussycats (2001)
We were pretty surprised to see this one recently on the Criterion Channel, since we remembered it as a frothy, poppy, disposable confection based on a hazily remembered Archie Comics series.
We remembered it wrong. Very wrong. The film, about a girl group unwittingly enlisted in a consumerist conspiracy, is a very Gen X, very entertaining time capsule about selling out. It used a cartoon from Gen Xers youth to help them explore questions they had seen play out again and again in grunge and hip-hop music — and perhaps in their own lives as they entered the job world.
The film arrived around the same time Napster foisted streaming onto the world, and made it a necessity for many artists to sell their songs to advertisers to stay afloat. So its messages seems a little dated today. But the film is a beautiful dream about what might have been if the world had stayed analog a little longer, and still works as a fun metaphor about art and commerce.
Josie and the Pussycats isn’t a cheap cash-in. It’s a well-made movie making fun of cheap cash-ins.
Also, the songs, especially “3 Small Words,” are cranking pop masterpieces (with Letters to Cleo vocalist Kay Hanley singing lead and stars Rachel Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson on the mic as well.) The film came from Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, the duo also behind the terrific Can’t Hardly Wait.
Legally Blonde (2001)
We love a Trojan Horse movie, and Legally Blonde is a perfect example — on the surface it’s a silly, frothy comedy, but it sneaks in a Sun Tzu-style message about never underestimating anybody.
Reese Witherspoon is impossibly endearing as Elle Woods, a sorority girl who tries to win back her ex-boyfriend by attending Harvard Law School. It’s impossible not to love a legal movie that climaxes in a big reveal about a perm.
Best of all, the film is inspired by the real experiences of Amanda Brown, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based after attending Stanford Law School and finding that her love of fashion and beauty trends put her out of step with many of her classmates.
Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Borat is filled with dumb jokes, but they’re a distraction from the film’s main thesis: If you act dumb enough to make people feel superior to you, they’ll let down their guard and show you who they really are.
Some people turn out to be great: a deleted scene shows the Job-like patience of a man forced to give Sacha Baron Cohen’s fake foreign journalist a supermarket tour. But the movie isn’t especially interested in showing people being patient: It delights in revealing the suspicions and prejudice of many of the people Borat meets in post-9/11 America.
But what takes the movie into genius territory is its fierce internal logic, held together by Sacha Baron Cohen’s jaw-dropping improvisation and timing. Every spontaneous interaction, with real-life people who don’t realize Borat is a joke, is somehow manipulated by director Larry Charles and the rest of the team into a cohesive and moving narrative.
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Main image: Top Secret. Paramount.