Avis Metacritic

What's so amazing about the Police Academy movies is that they keep being made even though they stopped being funny after the hilarious original. We're now up to No. 4, and the most you can say for it is that it is the teeniest bit better, not quite so crass as the last two...Director Jim Drake is at least brisk and amiable; if nothing else, Police Academy 4 is good-natured and doesn't drag.

The Police Academy series seems to shoot for an ever younger crowd. The optimum viewer for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol would be a 10-year-old boy. Even better, it would be a whole pack of them. That's not to say the film isn't funny; it means only that the sense of humor being addressed is very specific. Stay away if drawing room farce is what you're after.

Plenty of pigeon-shit, superglue and squirting ketchup sight gags, plus the usual smutty verbal innuendo. Highlights again include Goldthwait's strangulated vocal ejaculations, a couple of Ninja movie naff-dubbing jokes, and a signposted life-saving gag featuring the chesty Easterbrook in a wet T-shirt.

Director Jim Drake keeps things moving so quickly, one barely has time to notice just how stale the jokes here are.

There hasn`t been a movie quite like Police Academy 4 since, well . . . "Police Academy 3." Make that exactly like, because here are the same characters, the same situations and the same jokes (most of them focused on damage suffered in the genital region) that have served the series since its inauspicious debut in 1984.

Astoundingly, considering the fall of this film series from low aim to no aim at all, the original cast remains aboard. [8 Apr 1987, p.D8]

Citizens On Patrol might well have been subtitled When The Rot Set In.

"4" isn't even a film; it's more like a long trailer, a collection of scenes without sense. It has everything you expect and nothing more: flat and uninspired aural and visual jokes about bodily functions (people's and pigeons'), leather bars, porta-johns, superglue, fat and/or stupid people -- all interspersed with "training," jailbreaks and an airborne chase finale.