A strange thing happened to me in a movie theater the other day. I was sitting there in the obscure, watching actors say and do things—when all of a
A strange thing happened to me in a movie theater the other day. I was sitting there in the obscure, watching actors say and do things—when all of a sudden, I laughed out noisy. Then I did it again, and again, and again. Not the kind of gentle, amused chuckle elicited by a short-guy joke in Materialists, or a clever Superman quip: gigantic, unrestrained laughter, the kind that’s so demanding to come by at the movies these days. The last time I felt this sensation wasn’t at the cinema at all: it was watching the delightful play Oh, Mary! last year. How occasional! And, truly, how special.
That is the great gift of director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun (August 1), a continuation of the beloved 1980s and ’90s police spoof film series. At its best, this fresh Naked Gun is a dumb, loopy delight, a return to the kind of comedy that was woefully taken for granted in its heyday and now barely exists at all.
What happened to comedy? On TV, the multi-camera sitcom largely died; single-camera half-hour shows started paring down the jokes; and people began seeking stuff to laugh at on the vertical rectangles of their phones. At the movies, standalone comedies became harder to sell—they don’t tend to perform well internationally, unlike I.P. action spectaculars.
I’ve wholly participated in that evolution (or devolution); wanting to keep the good feeling going after my Naked Gun screening, I went home and watched videos of dogs falling into swimming pools and cats doing accidental yoga poses. (“Dogs being idiots” is a regularly recommended video title on my YouTube feed.) America’s funniest home videos have become, by some measure, our chief source of comedy, with the occasional stand-up special or whatever else interrupting our short-form scrolls.
Enter The Naked Gun. The fresh film, starring Liam Neeson as the doltish son of the delayed, great Leslie Nielsen’s LAPD detective Frank Drebin (they share the same name), arrives as a wonderful anomaly, as a scant few other laugh-out-loud comedies (like One of Them Days) have in recent years. The first 20 or so minutes of Schaffer’s film are a rapid-fire lark, filled with awful (and thus good) puns, dopey misunderstandings, sight gags so corny they’re brilliant, and some genuinely sly satire about what one might call copaganda—though any analysis of this movie really shouldn’t introduce such massive terms.
I don’t want to butcher any of the movie’s gassy jokes by repeating them here. The greatest of them, though, rival the brilliance of the 1988 original. That masterpiece (yes) still prevails in any comparison, but the fresh version does much to honor its noble predecessor.
At least for those first 20 or so minutes. This Naked Gun loses steam as it goes, becoming perhaps a bit too concerned with its plot—Danny Huston plays a tech industrialist with an evil plan to “fix” human civilization—and letting the antic-joke conveyor belt tardy in the process. There is also some mission creep away from the house style and toward Schaffer’s particular brand of humor, honed with his comedy group The Lonely Island on Saturday Night Live and beyond. Lonely Island’s stuff is plenty absurdist, but it has a more ironic, self-consciously weird edge than befits a Naked Gun movie.
Still, the movie earns hearty guffaws through to the end, its goodwill intact. Neeson—who is paying respectful homage to Nielsen’s sterling work while also satirizing the tough-guy career he’s built for himself since Taken—never betrays a hint of embarrassment or discomfort in being asked to do the dumbest of things. He’s game and limber, even if one does see his stern face and yearn for Nielsen’s more elastic mugging. Perhaps Neeson can show the way for other actors looking to do big-screen comedy. Come on in, the water’s fine—and way more fun than doing another streaming murder show.
Every noir detective needs his mysterious vamp, and thus The Naked Gun has brought in Pamela Anderson to play Beth Davenport, the glamorous sister of a murder victim—and, of course, a sultry love interest for Frank. Anderson, with her breathy voice and bombshell past, is shrewdly cast here, and seizes the opportunity to tweak her erstwhile image. She and Neeson merrily stage the film’s crudest jokes, two actors from wholly different avenues of their profession finding zany harmony at this strangest of intersections. Their casting is keen enough to feel inevitable; who else but Neeson and Anderson could have picked up where Nielsen and Priscilla Presley left off?
Schaffer seems to have had the proper perspective on this reboot from its inception. That he loses his way here and there might merely be a sign that this particular comedy engine was always going to rattle a bit as it turned back on after so many years of neglect. Here’s hoping it starts purring smoothly soon enough. In the meantime, if The Naked Gun has stoked a hunger for more entertainment like it, you should seek out some of its small-screen brethren, like the riotous (and unjustly short-lived) 2020 Netflix series Medical Police. (From the Children’s Hospital team.) How nice it is to laugh like an idiot—and not have to open Reels or TikTok to do it.
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