If you ever needed evidence that writing spoof comedy is like walking a razor, all you have to do is look and the microscopic differences between the first and second Naked Gun movies. Now, I’m not going to sit here and lay a typed-out beating on Leslie Nielsen’s third outing as Lieutenant Detective Frank Drebin (yes, third – the TV series Police Squad! came first) as the team of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker once again deliver a steady staccato of laughs in their sequel, however, you can’t deny that there’s a noticable slip in quality and it’s always fascinated me as to why.
So, while Drebin ploughs his way into another chaotic case and we try and move past the increased involvement of O.J. Simpson, it’s time for us to do some detective work of our own and figure out why The Naked Gun 2½ just simply isn’t as good as its predecessor despite still being pretty well stocked in jokes and outright spoofery.
After Police Squad’s finest – Lieutenant Detective Frank Drebin – spends his entire invite to The White House accidently brutalising Barbara Bush, in the background a plot emerges. While LA’s top cop abuses his lobster privileges and gives America’s First Lady blunt force trauma while leaving the restroom, there are parties present who are worried that the President is going to give an address that’s going to have him start pursuing more renewable forms of cleaner energy. As the heads of the coal, oil and nuclear energy companies start wringing their hands, scruples-free oil executive, Quentin Hapsburg, conjures up a scheme to take out the President’s advisor on the subject, Dr. Albert Meinheimer, with a handy timebomb.
However, when that plot is inadvertently foiled, Frank Drebin is called in to investigate only to find that his ex-girlfriend, Jane Spencer, is not only working at Meinheimer’s research institute, but she’s dating Hapsburg which causes no end of issues for the notoriously immature detective. But as Frank has a knack for solving major crimes by accident, Jane also seems to have an issue with being in close proximity to murderous businessman and after his bomb stunt failed, Hapsburg steps things up by kidnapping Meinheimer and replacing him with a double who give a speech renouncing clean energy.
As Drebin struggles to keep his mind on the job and with the entire future of the Earth’s ecosystem apparently on the line, it looks like Hapsburg is going to be victorious, but after catching some breaks and accidently exploding one of Hapsburg’s thugs with a well placed firehose, Drebin finally has enough dirt to bring the man down. But with Meinheimer’s dinner speech imminent, time is running out before his double misinformation the President. With only his pluck and a Mexican mariachi band disguise to help him, can Frank once again save the day?
So to answer the most pertinent question about any comedy: is The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell Of Fear funny? Yes it is – in fact, it’s tough not to get a laugh when Leslie Nielsen is involved (although some of his later movies certainly tried), however, when compared to that truly magnificent original, The Smell Of Fear noticably loses its potency and I’ve spent years idly working out why. As we all know, comedy is a lot like alchemy, as in the second you started breaking it down scientifically, it stops being funny (you ever get anyone to explain a joke you didn’t get? Painful, right?) and yet I’ve managed to come up with a couple of theories. The first is that more than a few of the gags here have been lifted wholesale from the Police Squad! TV series, and while that shouldn’t be too much of an issue because to this day it remains criminally unseen, it certainly bothered the shit out of me. Secondly, at times it feels that the ZAZ, partnership that gave us classics as Airplane!, Top Secret! and the original Naked Gun seems to be phoning it in a little. In fact, while David Zucker is still in place as a director, his compatriots are present in an Executive Producer capacity only which means the writing is immediately – by my calculations – two thirds less sharp as it once was. There’s also the fact that both Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams had other things going on with the former going on to direct the Oscar winning Ghost (which is predictably lampooned) and the latter launching his own spoof movie series in the form of Hot Shots! and thus the former comedy union wasn’t as focused as it once was.
However, the final issue is that bizarrely, Leslie Nielsen is now approaching the movie as primarily a comedian and is now somewhat mugging for laughs. While this doesn’t sound like much of a problem on paper, the reasons that movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun have obtained legendary spoof status is because almost no one involves acts like they’re trying to be funny. Back in those earlier movies, Nielsen delivered his lines as serious as a goddamn heart attack and subsequently an unlikely comedy legend was born. However, while that flawlessly grave delivery is still present, he’s also now broadly referencing and sign posting some of the jokes with silly faces, over the top reactions and way too many winks at the audience which takes that previous whip smart approach to dumb comedy and just… well, makes it dumber.
However, I must stress that while The Naked Gun 2½ is no stone cold comedy classic, it’s still frequently funny – just not consistently bust-a-gut funny. The film takes bigger, overt political swings (yes, bigger than having Drebin punch out the Ayatollah Khomeini in the first ten minutes) by having an actor in distractingly hideous George Bush Sr. prosthetics play a significant role and feature an environmentally friendly plot and the continued presence of O.J. Simpson is getting more than a little uncomfortable, but when it actually hits the bullseye, The Smell Of Fear raises quite the amusing stink.
For some reason, the continued abuse of Barbara Bush is hilarious, watching Drebin try to sneak into the villains warehouse by inadvertently swimming through raw sewage pays of beautifully thanks to his secret code word to call backup being “I love it!” and watching Nielsen’s desperate and determined attempts to sand a birthmark off a man’s butt cheek proves that not all of the overblown attempts at comedy shoots itself in the foot.
The rest of the cast do their jobs well, even if they also go down the same, face pulling route as Nielsen.
Seeing Priscilla Presley and George Kennedy return instigate warm feelings instantly and having Robert Goulet (probably best know by this generation as the singing voice of the asthmatic penguin from Toy Story 2) portray the villain continues the thread of Naked Gun bad guys who wouldn’t look out of place on an episode of Columbo.
OK, so it’s nowhere near as good as the original, but it is often funny (the titles joke of the speeding police car being born is fucking wild), even if it can’t quite nail it’s own style. It’s a strange thing to suggest that everyone involved should be taking making this comedy way more seriously, and maybe I should just lay off a movie that just wants to have fun being as stupid as it can be, but I just wish The Smell Of Fear were a little more pungent.
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