You have the right to remain giggling as Liam Neeson steps into Leslie Nielsen’s gun and badge in The Naked Gun, a reboot/sequel to the 1988 comedy, which was itself a big-screen adaptation of the brilliant but short-lived 1982 parody series Police Squad! Director Akiva Schaffer (Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers) and his co-writers keep the energy high and the gags absurd in an 85-minute barrage of hilarity that never stops to take a breath.
Reviving the formula of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the team behind comic masterpieces like Airplane! and Top Secret!, has eluded filmmakers over the last few decades; just look at the diminishing returns of the Scary Movie franchise. But Schaffer has always demonstrated an aptitude for the ZAZ brand of relentless non-sequitur humor; his feature debut Hot Rod pivoted from a pitch-perfect recreation of the “Never” number from Footloose into a hilariously extended sequence of Andy Samberg (or his stunt double, anyway) rolling and rolling and rolling down a hill. Later in that movie, Ebenezer Scrooge turned up for no apparent reason, so if anyone was going to nail the rapid-fire silliness and anything-for-a-laugh ethos of the masters, it’s Schaffer.
One of the filmmaker’s secret weapons here is Liam Neeson, stepping in as Frank Drebin, Jr., son of Nielsen’s character. Sharing his father’s penchant for misunderstanding basic sentences, and for punching first and asking questions later, Frank opens the film by foiling a bank robbery, thanks to his clever (and completely physics-defying) disguise as a young schoolgirl. Chewed out for his brash methods by his ever-irritated superior (CCH Pounder), Frank and his partner Ed Hocken, Jr. (Paul Walter Houser as the son of George Kennedy’s sidekick character) are reassigned to investigate a car crash in Malibu.
Wouldn’t you know it — the crash and the bank job are related, bringing Frank into contact with Beth (Pamela Anderson), the sexy author of books about true crimes based on stories she makes up, and tech billionaire Richard Cane; this week’s Musk-Bezos-Zuckerberg–inspired villain is played by Danny Huston, because of course it’s Danny Huston, who has built a career out of playing powerful and wealthy scumbags.
One of the great jokes of Airplane! was the straight-faced delivery of deadpan nonsense from characters played by the likes of Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves, none of whom had ever previously gotten to play characters with the slightest whiff of a sense of humor. We don’t really have actors like that anymore in contemporary film or TV — unless someone can talk Daniel Day-Lewis into a movie that requires fart jokes — but Neeson is the next best thing, spoofing the super-spies and tough guys that have made up the bulk of his latter-day career. Writers Schaffer and Dan Gregor and Doug Mand have wisely realized that gun-happy LAPD cops aren’t anyone’s idea of wacky comedy, but who needs gunfire when Neeson’s Drebin can literally chew up his adversary’s weapon or punch out a queue of goons while standing under a “Now Serving” counter-board?
For her part, Anderson is also thoroughly game — she’s got a scene in a jazz club that, from this point forward, will be part of every one of her career-retrospective reels — and while she plays her up femme-fatale qualities, The Naked Gun never exploits her or turns her into a punchline, instead goofing on the men who are putty in her hands. (“She had a body that could carry her head,” narrates Drebin, “and a butt that seemed to say, ‘Hello, I’m a talking butt.’”) Huston is clearly having a great time making fun of the many villains he’s portrayed over the years, and as with the recent Fantastic Four movie, Hauser is a stealth MVP, investing himself in the insane dialogue and the physical bits. (There’s a running gag involving Neeson and Hauser’s cops being handed to-go cups of coffee that’s a marvel of choreography.)
Composer Lorne Balfe takes a page from Elmer Bernstein’s Airplane! score, playing it absolutely straight, and the cinematography by Brandon Trost (Nightbitch) similarly evokes a straightforward policier so that Schaffer and company can have their fun against a serious backdrop.
The Naked Gun comes in at a lean 85 minutes, but stay seated for the whole thing, as even the closing credits become a vehicle for jokes on top of jokes. And since sequels like Airplane II and The Naked Gun 33 1/3 were always pallid disappointments, here’s hoping Schaffer and Neeson might skip that route and instead reboot Top Secret! next.
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Screenwriters: Dan Gregor & Doug Mand & Akiva Schaffer, based on characters created by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Cody Rhodes, Liza Koshy, Eddie Yu, Danny Huston
Producers: Seth MacFarlane, Erica Huggins
Executive producers: Daniel M. Stillman, Akiva Schaffer, Pete Chiappetta, Anthony Tittanegro, Andrew Lary
Cinematographer: Brandon Trost
Production design: Bill Brzeski
Editing: Brian Scott Olds
Music: Lorne Balfe
Sound design: Dan Kenyon, re-recording mixer, sound designer, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Domain Entertainment, Fuzzy Door
In English
85 minutes
