President Thomas “Tug” Benson (played Lloyd Bridges)
An admiral in 1991’s Hot Shots!, Bridges’ Benson earned a promotion to commander-in-chief in the sequel. In this parody of the Rambo movies, Charlie Sheen’s Topper Harley leads a commando mission into Iraq to rescue some captured American troops. Several previous missions have failed, and after Topper’s team is captured, Benson decides to take matters into his own hands by invading Iraq himself.
In Bridges’ scene-stealing portrayal, Benson seems permanently addled from years of combat (he gets most of the best lines, though, as when he tells a group of Japanese business leaders, “It seems like only yesterday I was strafing many of your homes. Here I am today, begging you not to make such good cars.”). Nonetheless, he does find Saddam Hussein and takes him on in a fight to the finish (“We’ll settle this the old Navy way,” Benson says. “The first guy to die loses”).
After a Jedi-style duel involving fireplace pokers, Benson defeats the dictator with an unlikely weapon, a fire extinguisher. Still, it would have been a lot more convenient if the opposing forces could have followed Benson’s initial plan and staged their confrontation in Minnesota. “We’ll fly them over here. Their families, too. We’ll teach them to skate… Do I have to think of everything?”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu2W6E5DTH4]