Paramount Pictures
It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since comedy classic Airplane! hit movie screens, giving the Airport series of films the MAD Magazine treatment but with real people instead of just comic book panels. The stupidly absurd comedy was a massive hit and catapulted the creative team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, collectively known as ZAZ, into the stratosphere. So what did they do next? The boys attempted to do for TV cop shows what Airplane! did for (or to) disaster movies with the comedy series Police Squad!, starring Leslie Nielsen who had also had a role in Airplane!. The series was just as funny as their movie but … ABC found out that people just weren’t watching because it was a show that actually required them to sit down and watch to catch all of the sight gags and jokes. People just used TV for background noise so Police Squad! was quickly cancelled after just six glorious episodes. The ZAZ guys went back to the big screen with Top Secret! in 1984, introducing Val Kilmer to the world, but Police Squad! was never far from their minds, so in 1988 they reunited with Nielsen to bring Det. Frank Drebin back to life and larger than life in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, and the movie was a hit because they had a captive audience. It was so big, it spawned two sequels and the whole venture with ZAZ gave Nielsen, who had previously been a serious actor in films like Forbidden Planet and The Poseidon Adventure, a whole new career as a comedy star. Being a serious actor was what made him so good at comedy, because playing the situations straight made them all the more absurdly funny and Nielsen was always in on the joke. Now 31 years after The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, Seth MacFarlane and The Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer has resurrected the franchise with the aptly titled The Naked Gun … just to make it a little confusing for everyone.
This version of The Naked Gun stars Liam Neeson (whose name has the ring of Leslie Nielsen to it, which probably isn’t an accident when it comes to the casting) as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., picking up the torch where his father left off in the third movie (making this a legacy sequel, not a reboot). All Drebin wants to do is make his daddy proud, but his unorthodox antics are causing problems not only with his captain, but city officials as well, putting the existence of Police Squad in jeopardy. Defying his captain’s orders, Frank continues to work on a case and Elon Musk-like tech billionaire, Richard Cane, who seems to have some involvement with an accident involving an electric car from his company and one of his employees who died after it drove itself off a cliff. Drebin also gets entangled with the dead man’s sister, Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), who doesn’t want to sit around waiting for the police to do their job so she begins digging for information on her own, forcing Frank to partner up with her to keep an eye on things and keep her out of danger. Sight gags, dad jokes and double entendres fly, but Frank and Beth don’t know Cane is always one step ahead of them, preparing to put his real master plan into action — sending out a signal during a UFC-type event that turns people into raging lunatics (or calming them up) with the help of his secret P.L.O.T. Device. Will Frank be able to calm the people down before it’s too late, or will Cane and his billionaire buddies and chosen few retreat to a hidden mountain lair to wait it all out, with entertainment provided by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic? With Drebin on the case it could go either way.
If you saw the trailer for The Naked Gun you may have been wondering if this film was a comedy or not because there was absolutely nothing in the trailer that garnered any laughs. Perhaps it was because much of the comedy didn’t work out of context, but there were some serious reservations about the movie heading into the screening. Post screening reviews seem to be saying that the movie is just as funny as the originals … but we’ll beg to differ. The Naked Gun has several laughs throughout the movie, but there were no guffaws, no one in the theater was slapping their knees or busting a gut or gasping for air and wiping away tears because they were laughing that hard. The style of comedy perfected by Abrahams and the Zuckers is nearly impossible to replicate, and that was made evident over the years since Airplane! was released. The Naked Gun really, really tries — maybe too hard — to do what worked so well before but the comedy never reaches those heights of stupidity (and I mean that as a compliment). Tonally it just feels a bit off, like they were trying too hard to play it straight so the absurdity would actually be funny, but it just falls flat more than it lands and gets a laugh.
That could also come down to the casting of Neeson, not the person you’d think of for this kind of comedy — which should have been a genius move. Neeson is obviously all-in, playing off of the action hero roles he’s been known for over the last twenty years. It really should have been a slam dunk, but he’s actually playing the role too seriously and hoping that will sell the laughs. He can certainly deliver the lines with some decent timing, but he just doesn’t manage to make them funny, and some of his action scenes range from amusing to embarrassing. He just doesn’t have that twinkle in his eye that Nielsen had, and to make matters worse he is completely overshadowed by his co-stars who actually have done some comedy work in the past.
Paramount Pictures
CCH Pounder is perfectly blustery as Chief Davis, at her wits end with Drebin’s antics, and she has one of the movie’s funniest scenes when she calls Drebin in for a stern talking to (I won’t say where the talk happens because the location and one other actor in the room make it all the more hilarious). The movie really could have done with more Pounder. Danny Huston isn’t really known for comedy but his Richard Cane is a delight. He’s actually having fun getting to be silly, he has that Nielsen twinkle, making you think, ‘Wow, maybe he should have played Drebin.’ He had one really inappropriate line that made me laugh out loud (one of the two times I laughed out loud) because it was such a shock to hear a particular word (be advised, some of the dialog may push accepted boundaries to get a laugh). Kevin Durand was also good as Cane’s henchman Sig Gustafson, the tightly focused muscle who also can play a tough guy and get some laughs. Unfortunately, Liza Koshy as Det. Barnes and Paul Walter Hauser as Drebin’s partner Ed are barely there.
The biggest surprise is Pamela Anderson as Beth. Anderson has had a career resurgence lately, recently proving her dramatic chops in The Last Showgirl and earning respect among the critics who only regarded her as a blonde bombshell bimbo. in The Naked Gun, she gets to harness both the drama and the comedy, her character sexy but not over-the-top, with some great comic timing and one big scene in a jazz club that was the other laugh-out-loud moment because she just throws herself into how absolutely stupid (again, in a good way) that moment is (it may go on for a bit too long, but that’s not on her). She really does manage to outshine Neeson because she is also channeling that Leslie Nielsen spirit, and also matching perfectly the performances of Priscilla Presley in the original movies. (Speaking of Presley, she has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it split second cameo, presumably as Frank’s mother during the film’s climax.)
The Naked Gun tries, really hard, to capture the comedy magic that made Police Squad! and the original trilogy so special. Perhaps too hard. They managed to get a great supporting cast to surround Liam Neeson, but it just feels like someone forgot to let Neeson in on the joke, like they told him to just play his character from the Taken franchise and let all the comedy happen around you, say your lines completely straight and that will make it funny. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work as well as it should have, but perhaps if the film is successful enough at the box office, they’ll get Neeson to loosen up just a bit for the sequel … or give Danny Huston the job. At least at 85 minutes, the movie does not overstay its welcome. And be sure to stay through the credits. There is an homage to Police Squad! and a final post-credits scene that is pretty funny.
The Naked Gun has a run time of 1 hour 25 minutes, and is rated PG-13 for crude/sexual material, violence/bloody images and brief partial nudity.
Paramount Pictures