Summary
David Hasselhoff lives a double life as a successful singer and a spy in his first original audiobook adventure. It’s as nutty and randomly fun as that entire sentence would imply.
When you think about the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the demolition of the Berlin Wall, David Hasselhoff may not be the first name that comes to mind. Sure, his track “Looking for Freedom” was a hit in a divided Germany in the late 1980s, culminating in him performing on the Berlin Wall on New Years Eve 1989.
Of course, none of us realised that he was a super spy on both sides of the Wall in the lead-up to this historic concert. In a Hasselhoff original audiobook for Audible, written (with David Gordon) and performed by the actor himself, the singular star blends fact with fiction to create a surprisingly satisfying – if self-consciously goofy – spy caper.
The setup is simplicity itself: Hasselhoff is about to embark on a tour of Germany to celebrate his hit single and Knight Rider fame. Meanwhile, CIA Agent Nick Harper is also in town to stop a catastrophic threat. The twist is that Nick is a doppelgänger of the Hoff. So while Nick fends off rabid fans and has to stretch his vocal chops, the real Hoff gets caught up in a spy saga that uses all of his considerable acting talents.
A career memoir remixed as a comedy of errors, Hasselhoff is aware enough to skewer the apotheosis of his fame with good-natured and self-effacing humour. Describing his double as the “shyer, less handsome brother,” the Hoff casts himself as a charismatic egotist who becomes “terrified and only slightly turned on” by the events happening around him. He even references future events, including the mega success of Baywatch, by using a dream sequence foretelling its fame.
Relying heavily on convention, Hasselhoff swings from one romantic encounter to the next. In one moment he’s at the barrel end of a father’s shotgun thanks to a sexual liaison with his daughter, and in the next he’s talking his way out of a low-stakes torture scene. It’s all shenanigans really: rarely does the drama ever take over the loose plotting, and never do we feel like there’s any actual threat to the narrator. Meanwhile, Hasselhoff takes every opportunity to drop in an over-the-top pun. Is it possible to mug the camera on an audiobook? (How’s that for a new badge achievement, Audible?)
At just over 8 hours, this takes you at least four times longer to get through than any equivalent made-for-TV counterpart that might surface. Of course, you wouldn’t be treated to quite so many lovably hammy pieces of dialogue and swashbuckling encounters as we are here. By the end of it, you may actually believe that Hasselhoff is a living hero to the German people.
With a fictional version of Hasselhoff, the writer/actor may have found a way of reliving his glory days without the digital de-ageing that cinema would require to pull this off. Prime for future adventures across world, you don’t even have to rewatch Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. to get your Hoff spy fix. Now try and get “Looking for Freedom” out of your head.
2019 | US | WRITER: David Hasselhoff (with David Gordon) | PUBLISHER: Audible | LENGTH: 492 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 22 February 2019 (AUS)
