Director: Akiva Schaffer
Stars: Pamela Anderson, Liam Neeson, Paul Walter Hauser
The problem with the legacy of the pun-happy, wantonly daft OG Naked Gun films is that they were somewhat tainted by the indiscriminate (and often discriminatory) parade of poor parody pieces that their star Leslie Nielsen signed on for afterwards. By the end of the ’00s, Nielsen’s name on a movie was pretty much a black mark against it. But those first two spin-offs from the short-lived, doolally Police Squad TV series still hit remarkably high on the laugh-o-meter… provided their humour tickles your funny bone in the first place, that is.
News of this legacy sequel drafting in Liam Neeson as Lt. Frank Drebin, Jr. didn’t exactly breed lofty expectations given the dire state of American comedy movies at present. Most are consigned to streaming anonymity and, frankly, it’s the best place for them. The trailers for this eleventh hour rehash did little to whet the appetite. To put it bluntly, The Naked Gun circa 2025 looked like dogshit. Another barrel-scraping IP cash-in.
Then this week happened.
I’m not usually one to read too many reviews prior to seeing a film (mostly to avoid biasing myself or inadvertently taking on another writer’s perspective) but it was hard to ignore the waves of praise being heaped upon The Naked Gun after those initial critic’s previews. Tessellating those raves with my own miniscule expectations proved too intriguing to resist and, what the hell, I haven’t written an outright pan review in a minute.
It’s gonna be a minute more. Here I am joining the chorus because, against all probability or likelihood, Liam Neeson’s Naked Gun reboot is a hoot. It’s such a hoot it even has an owl. Helmed by Akiva Schaffer – one-time Lonely Islander and director of, among other things, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping – The Naked Gun feels bizarrely refreshing because we just don’t see all-out comedies like this at the multiplex these days. And by comedies I mean movies where the upmost intention is to get you blurting out laughter in spite of yourself. If Schaffer’s film is enjoying a soft landing because of this relative novelty in the modern cinematic landscape, so be it. Like Jackass Forever a couple of years ago, the disarming lack of pretention here is incredibly appealing. It also helps that the hit ratio of the jokes is really very high.
It does start poorly. We open with the routine that featured heavily in the trailers, where Neeson interrupts a bank robbery by disguising himself as a schoolgirl, showing off his knickers to the class. And, for maybe ten minutes following that, there’s a strange period of unease as we’re asked to warm to the new class. Drebin, Jr. is joined by Captain Hocken, Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) and sits under the thumb of Chief Davis (CCH Pounder). It all has the uneasy feel of a SNL sketch; a cosplay routine that isn’t quite as comfortable as the material it’s mimicking. But this spell wears off. Because The Naked Gun works by accumulation. Even if every single gag isn’t to your liking, soon they’re snowballing with impeccable Commitment to the Bit. Everything from Drebin’s insane interactions with various coffee cups to the movie’s bizarre insistence that every pop culture reference be about two decades out of date (Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago and Black Eyed Peas, anyone?).
Once this momentum is achieved, there’s really no looking back. The Naked Gun comes at you with joke after joke at a rate that kindles memories of The Simpsons in its heyday. It’s not afraid of being profoundly weird (a montage involving a snowman was a personal highpoint), while simultaneously sticking to the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker rulebook of old, particularly when it comes to wordplay (“UCLA?” “I see it every day, I live here.”).
I was afraid that it’d all come off a little Movie 43, and that Neeson would be lost here, but my fears were unjustified. It’s easy to forget that Nielsen spent decades as a dry dramatic actor before Airplane! skewered his screen persona for good. Neeson gamely sends up his own late-career renaissance as an action star, and his seeming keenness to enter a new phase as a sincere goofball carries with it a lot of good will.
He is ably supported by Pamela Anderson, terrific as age-appropriate femme fatale Beth Davenport (aka Ms. Spaghetti). Anderson’s career second wind is among the year’s most welcome success stories. She’s always been funny. Anyone who’s sat down with her deeply goofy LA bodyguard series VIP will know that. Here she channels her heroine Marilyn Monroe splendidly. The chemistry between Neeson and Anderson is fab, and somehow the seemingly-real romance between them off set only adds to the sense of enjoyment found in watching them discover and play off of one another. And they’re not the only ones having fun. Danny Huston’s having a whale of a time playing the movie’s baddie; a smug tech billionaire in the Elon Musk mould whose P.L.O.T. Device strings this thing along to it’s ramshackle conclusion.
The Naked Gun also succeeds in avoiding many of the pitfalls and traps that the likes of the Scary, Epic, Disaster and Date Movies fell into. There’s little sense that the jokes are punching down at anyone (this movie is a great rejoinder to the complaint that You Can’t Say Anything Nowadays – look, you can be funny without being mean!). By deliberately dating its pop culture references it effectively future-proofs itself, teeing off touchstones that have already proven long-lasting. And it leans on it’s own nostalgia only a little bit. Schaffer seems keen enough to realise that the style of the humour is nostalgic in and of itself, so we only need so many callbacks or references to the movies that came before. It doesn’t feel like cumbersome litter that the new guys have to kick through.
And, not for nothing, The Naked Gun circa 2025 seems keenly aware that the perception of the LA cop has changed somewhat in the last 35 years. There’s a scabrous satirical through-line here that acknowledges abuses of power as well as how easily such abuse is shrugged off by White Men of a Certain Age. A dark undertone that Schaffer never lets spoil the party, yet it’s there nevertheless.
Not everything works, but enough of it does, and that’s the main thing. It feels like there hasn’t been a comedy movie with this amount of ammunition under it’s (bulletproof) vest in years. And certainly not one mad enough to kick said ammunition into multiple faces to the anthemic tune of Fergie’s “Fergalicious”. No, really, I wasn’t kidding about the Black Eyes Peas fixation.
And now, thanks to an appreciably dippy little cameo, there are two movies starring Pamela Anderson and Dave Bautista vying for a place on my Best of the Year list. That one of them is this blows my mind, but here we are. Good times.
The Lost Highway Hotel 