Depending on where you sit on the rise/fall of the spoof comedy in American cinema, the third and final cinematic outing of Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin was either the last positive gasp for cinemas silliest subgenre, or the movie that signified its spiral into endless, derivative movie parodies such as Meet The Spartans or whatever installment the Scary Movie franchise currently sits on. Once, the genre was fiercely original, tweaking the noses of conventional comedy and lure previously serious actors to deliver hilarious lines with the type of seriousness usually reserved for a death sentencing. But as time went on, the spoof got cheaper and lazier until they became virtual laugh-free zones that raised about as much mirth as watching your pet get euthanized.
Sitting cross-legged on this tipping point was a typically clueless looking Frank Drebin as Naked Gun 33⅓ seemed to indulge in a lot of bad habits the genre would go on to overuse, but can we truly blame Frank Derbin’s last ride for what came next?
Lieutenant Frank Drebin has finally retired from Police Squad and seemingly lives a content life as a house husband while his wife, Jane, is now the primary breadwinner as a bigshot lawyer. However, there’s trouble in paradise as while Jane is secretly yearning for a child, Frank is unfulfilled, having reoccurring nightmares about riding crime rates and missing the unbeatable thrill of legally shooting a fleeing drug dealer. Soon the stress is undeniable and even marriage counselling seems unable to stop the growing discontent within the Drebin household, but when old Police Squad comrades Ed and Nordberg come calling with a favour to ask, Frank soon finds himself in the middle of another case.
After a trip to the sperm donor clinic to scope out the girlfriend of incarcerated bomber for hire, Rocco Dillon, Frank soon finds the swift tug of law enforcement (among other things) drives him even further from his marriage and after Jane walks out on him, he soon finds himself volunteering to go undercover in prison to get close to Rocco and discover his plan.
Of course, during the process of making friends with the bomber in the clink, Frank ends up breaking out with him in order to discover his next target, but even Drebin couldn’t imagine that the terrorist act that Rocco is about to perpetrate is to try and blow up the Oscars. Worse yet, in an attempt to reconcile, Jane has followed Frank to Rocco’s hideout and promptly gotten herself mixed up in the whole affair as a hostage. Can Frank not only manage to save the day once again, but somehow not utterly destroy an entire Oscars ceremony with his usual brand of flailing police work? Hey, come on – you can only have one of the other; you can’t have both.
While it may have sounded like I was giving too much credit to Naked Gun 33⅓ being the turning point for all things spoof, you can’t deny that it indulges in a lot of aspects that eventually brought the genre crashing down. For a start, while the whole point of a spoof is to lampoon a movie genre such as the disaster movie, but one of the more annoying habits of modern spoofs is the act of just lazily ripping the piss out of other movies that have no connection to the main film other than just poking fun at modern pop culture that doesn’t require any imagination whatsoever. To be fair, Mel Brooks also started to veer into this area also and The Final Insult manages to cover its ass just enough by tying it in to the rather genius idea of setting it at the Oscars, but while a legitimately fun parody of the train station shootout from The Untouchables (itself adapted from Battleship Potemkin) and such low hanging fruit as “Geriatric Park” manage to land, random riffs on the likes of Thelma And Louise prove to be more miss than hit.
However, if we’re using Naked Gun 33⅓ to mark things, then we should also recognise that it was the last truly funny comedy to predominantly feature Leslie Nielsen and thus needs to be embraced as such. Is it funnier than Airplane! or the original Naked Gun? God no, but it moves at a faster clip than Naked Gun 2½ and it certainly busts way more guts than the likes of Repossesed, Dracula: Dead And Loving It, Spy Hard and Mr. Magoo all put together.
It’s also a timely reminder that even though Nielsen was a household comedy name, the Naked Gun flicks could get quite raw at times. There’s an extended gag involving Frank getting stuck at the sperm clinic that requires him to make repeated deposits in order for him to remain undetected and there’s possibly cinema’s least subtle Crying Game joke that’s probably dated about as well as you’d expect, but it’s all delivered with a sense of innocent (if admittedly mischievous) fun that counts its sole desire as just making people chuckle at silly shit.
But then, that’s probably the movies greatest flaw too. While you’ll certainly chuckle a fair deal, there’s nothing here that made me legitimately throw my head back and howl with mirth the was the original did, Peter Segal’s grasp of spoof is nowhere in the realms of what the original team of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker managed to pull off in their prime and instead we get the same amount of amusing echo that we got with Airplane II: The Sequel. Still, all this actual criticism of a comedy that features a moment where O.J. Simpson almost spikes a baby like a football seems weirdly a little snobby – although we should probably never forget that meres months after this movie was released, O.J. Simpson was accused of murder and we all know how that turned out.
So let’s embrace the funny. Those opening credits once again score high, whether that POV of the flashing light of a cop car is hurtling down a flume at a water park or making the tench run during the battle of the Death Star and it’s always great to see Fred Ward in something. As always, there’s also the odd killer one liner too, such as “I like my sex the way I play basketball, one on one with as little dribbling as possible.” and the film moves so fast that even if a joke doesn’t land, there’s literally three waiting in the wings to take a punt.
However, it’s an unavoidable fact that not only had the spoof seen better days, but it’s fortunes we’re about to get even worse. While I understand that the Wayans Brother’s Scary Movie had more than it’s fair share of fans, it’s sequels soon descended into offensive mediocrity and from there things only got worse and increasingly unfunny and subsequent spoofs ended up becoming just a series of unfunny sketches.
Every time you get Leslie Nielsen mugging things up as Lieutenant Frank Drebin, you can count on something making you laugh (especially if at least one of the Z,A,Z team is still involved), but while Naked Gun 33⅓ is a good chunk of disposable spoof, it’s unavoidably a shadow of its former glories that unwittingly signified the end of an era. But again, I’m treating something so silly incredibly seriously, so enjoy the final sight of Nielsen avoiding prison rape thanks to some cast iron underwear and wave a fond farewell to Frank Drebin of Police Squad.
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