One of my all time favorites.

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Brilliant Conflict

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's Birch County, California. Deputy Halik (James Keach) is a brute that just got his promotion from the Chief. Judge Nedra Henderson (Sally Kellerman) orders a bunch of bad drivers to traffic school. Dana Cannon (John Murray) tricks Halik and Deputy Morris to smash up the Chief's car. They are reduced to teaching traffic school. Judge Henderson conspire with the two cops to fail the incompetent group and sell their impounded vehicles. The group includes Cannon, the ditsy NASA scientist Amy Hopkins (Jennifer Tilly), hypochondriac Joan Pudillo (Wendie Jo Sperber), puppeteer Scott Greeber (Brian Backer), Doc Williams (Fred Willard) and near-blind Loretta Houk (Nedra Volz) who drove Emma Jean (Where's the beef? Clara Peller) onto the airport runway.John Murray is not funny enough and is a pale imitation of his brother Bill Murray. The movie may work marginally with Bill in the lead. Without him, the movie has limits and one can't help but notice that John's mannerisms are very alike to Bill. Of course, John doesn't quite have the same charisma or energy. The movie struggles to maintain group chemistry. The jokes struggle for laughs.

In a year that saw a trio of Police Academy type movies, here's one underscored comedy that's a potpouri of laughs and that's what makes good comedies. The script has a lot of awesome lines, in a story about a group of delinquent drivers who are assigned back to traffic school (we've all been there) where the two sour tutors cops (one of them James Keach) who Murray gets off on the wrong foot with at the start, just happen to be corrupt. Troublemaker and head delinquent, John Murray is the magic to the film, to be honest with ya, with an average performance. The others are better. I would of liked to see him in other films, though. His reason for getting thrown back into traffic school is a joke, as another repeating student, who hits a coffin with a puppet stage, propelling it into a freshly dug hole. A half blinded old woman creates side splitting laughter at the start ending up an airport tarmac instead of another road, and the hilarity goes on. The series of accidents, that explains their reasons for ending up at traffic school at the start, is formatted the same way as in that other comedy, Stewardess School, which I openly admit, was a bit funnier than this. All these students too have their cars impounded, by the way, where they have to pay a hefty fee, without a certain period or their cars get auctioned off, as quoted by a ruthless female judge, (Kellerman who's secretly doing Keach). What was great about this, when I first saw it and now, was just watching bitter rivals Murray and Keach go at each other. This movie is one of those infectious ones of cheap laughs, that really doesn't it's flavor or humor ratio. If a fan of these type films, this is an 85' one to see, where laughs are constant without. Jennifer Tilly, (Meg's sister0 not big back then, is cute as one of the students, who's scene with Murray in a gravity chamber is unforgettable, as is the last scene, which is I guess a kind of cruel de jav u of bad luck. Funny, funny, fuuuuu-ny.

At the time this film was made (the 1980s), it was sometimes the case that a person might enjoy watching horror films. This cultural moment is crystallized in artistic permanence here by the character of Wink Barnes, played by Ned Eisenberg. In his many scenes, Mr. Barnes brings up the topic of horror films despite their inapplicability to the diaphanous and delicate plot of Moving Violations. On meeting a woman, he asks her about her own tastes in horror cinema. Being told that a classmate is anxious about his father's reaction to a dismaying contretemps, Wink advises watching a horror film. When Dana Cannon tells a largely pointless anecdote about violence in the Arab world, Wink arrives and announces that he, given his tastes for violence, would like to see such a thing. Asked to meet his friends socially, he arrives dressed as Jason Voorhees. Some sophisticated viewers might feel that they had come to sufficiently understand Wink's character at this point and would not need to see his schtick reiterated without elaboration any more. Such viewers are in for a surprise as Barnes appears again and again, sounding his one note each time.Other fashions and political movements of the 1980s are similarly examined by the film (punk music, space exploration, perms), but none with the relentless jackhammer regularity of the mystifyingly dull jokes about Wink Barnes's taste in film.

Too much fun! Even though this film would seem way too cheesy and juvenile on the surface, there are just too many laughs for it not to be an entertaining experience. From the makers of Police Academy and Bachelor Party, Moving Violations has enough one-liners and sight gags to more than make up for its lack of plot. Though some of the gags make Dumb and Dumber seem like an episode of Frazier, I guarantee you'll be laughing at it in spite of yourself.The story concerns a group of perennial bad drivers who are sentenced to a strict traffic school in which they have to pass the course or forfeit their cars to the county. The class is run by two bad-ass motorcycle cops played by James Keach and Lisa Hart Carroll. They have their characters down so well, they'll even frighten you. Keach has a scheme going with the judge that sentenced the bad drivers to the course. Their plan is to make the class impossible and somehow split the profits from the impounded vehicles themselves. To detail this plot any further would be a dis-service to not only this review, but the film itself.John Murray plays the ringleader of the traffic school bunch. He is certainly no Bill Murray, but he's very charismatic and funny. Most of the other students are made up of typically wacky characters you might expect to find in a movie like this. Most of them are thankfully more funny than annoying. The cast is made up of many familiar faces; some of which went on to better things, and some of them just disappeared. Look closely and you'll spot Don Cheadle working at a fast food drive up window for about five seconds! Since there is so little plot, the film must count on sight gags involving cars being destroyed, old people with diminished facilities, bondage, puppet stages rolling down hills and into funeral homes, you name it. Toward the end, there is as one might expect, a climatic chase scene involving parade floats, a group of marathon runners, and about a thousand cops chasing after our heroes while they're on their way to police headquarters to expose the scheme to sell their cars. By this point, you'll be either rolling with laughter or you will have shut the movie off long before then.Maybe it's not quite a classic, but I'd say it's a cut above Police Academy and somewhere just below Airplane or Top Secret. The odds are you'll find more than a few things to laugh at.7 of 10 stars.The Hound.