The secret to comedy is timing, but even then, thirty-one years is a hell of a long time to wait for a punchline. That’s right, Lieutenant Frank Drebin (and seemingly by extension, comedy itself) is back in a requel that sees the king of gravelly threats himself, Liam Neeson, play the son of Leslie Nielsen’s legendarily catastrophic cop. To be fair, I was highly suspicious that the genre of spoof comedy would even make a comeback after arguably experiencing a downward spiral since the mid-nineties (never been a huge fan of Scary Movies personally), and while the idea of Neeson finally switching to full comedy after memorable skits and cameos in the likes of Ted 2 and Life’s Too Short (his “improvisational comedy bit is truly magnificent) seems potentially inspired, it would take more than a teaser trailer hinging entirely around a cracker of an O.J. Simpson joke to fully convince me that big screen comedy was truly back. Well, colour me pleasantly surprised, because not only is the new Naked Gun pretty damn funny, it could be the shot in the funny bone we all need right now.
Frank Drebin Jr. is one of the most decorated officers in Police Squad, a special branch of the LAPD that sees its impressive stats take a bump when Drebin takes out an entire gang of robbers during a bank job. However, while his colleagues pat him on the back and his superiors chastise him for his unauthodox methods (dressing up as a girl scout to gain entrance to the bank ain’t exactly standard operating procedure), he soon finds himself in the middle of a sprawling case when he’s transfered to the devision handling automobile accidents.
The apparent suicide of a man who crashed an electric made by tech billionaire Richard Crane leads Drebin to cross paths with the sister of the deceased, Beth Davenport who, when she isn’t taking chairs and inspiring various horny inner monologues of surrounding men, believes that her brother’s death was no accident. Following his lead like the tenacious, law upholding pitbull that he is, Drebin embarks on trying to unravel a fiendish conspiracy that involves the unfortunate ramifications of mass ingestion of chillidogs a literal plot device, impromptu jazz riffs and a literal plot device that could ultimately bring down humanity as we know it.
However, as Drebin finds himself falling for Beth hard, he finds himself uncertain of who to trust, I mean, if his own electric car tries to murder him, who’s to say Beth isn’t in on it too? But as Crane begins to put his plan in motion, it’s time for Drebin to do what he does best – no, not enthusiastically break the law at will… well, yes actually, that’s exactly what he’s good at. But it’s for a good cause and if it saves the world, what’s a few illegal activities between friends?
To further drive home the point of timing, it truly does seem that The Naked Gun has arrived, Gandalf style, to turn the tide. Silly, absurdist comedy on the big screen has been virtually absent for well over a decade and the genre itself, once so vibrant and plentiful, was looking to go the way of the western if someone didn’t do something soon. Likewise, Liam Neeson’s action career had grown so creaky and drawn out since his Taken days, it was tipping headlong into self parody anyway so in many ways, so the opportunity at had wasn’t just fortuitous, it seemed perversely perfect. But still, I still remained fairly unconvinced that Neeson could revive the spoof, even if the team backing him up included The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer on directing duties and Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane as a producer.
Well, miraculously, all involved have proved me utterly wrong by delivering a new Naked Gun that may not quite equal the original, but certainly proves to be the best spoof movie of its kind since Hot Shots! Part Deux. The secret is gag rate – nope, not the amount of times you can throw up in a short space of time – but the sheer amount of jokes you can hurl up on a screen and not utterly overwhelm your audience. Yes, the jokes may be of varied value, but that’s the beauty of it; if your jokes are of a generally high value then it doesn’t matter if the odd one bombs every now and then because normal service will be resumed in a matter of seconds. It also aids the cause that the jokes are incredibly varied. Some are verbal examples of verbal nonsense such as a conversation about the death of Drebin’s wife (“How did she pass?”, “Great, 50 yards easy. Arm like a cannon… and then she died.”), verbose slapstick, toilet humour (“She had a bottom that would make a toilet beg for the brown.”) and occasional lapses into the absurdly surreal such as a truly bizarre segue into an extended skit involving a living snowman. Some, if not all, of the gags are fantastically stupid and yet not only does it take an army of intelligent people to pull it off, they manage it to such a degree that you’ll find yourself willingly giving in to its ludicrous charms in no time at all.
Standing front and centre in this maelstrom of mirth is Neeson who may attack the role a bit more aggressively that Nielsen did, but he proves pretty quickly that he has the same talent for delivering utter nonsense with the dead-pan gravity of a doctor telling a patient that they have three days left to live. But when he isn’t incredulously remarking “Since when do cops have to follow the law?” or freaking out during a climactic freeze frame, Neeson is ably assisted by a supporting cast who helpfully understands the assignment just as much. Pamela Anderson continues her impressive career resurrection by not only displaying some impressive comedy chops of her own, but having some truly tangible chemistry with Neeson that helps cement some of those jokes in a way that goes way beyond just being simply “funny”. Elsewhere, we find Danny Huston positively relishing taking a break from being deadly serious movies as he gets to play the tech villain who wants to change the world in a way that isn’t too far removed from the first Kingsman movie and other such faces such as CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand and Paul Walter Hauser manage to provide healthy comic timing with the best of them.
But even though Frank Drebin Jr. may end up saving the world, can he actually end up saving big screen comedy? Well, that’s something the box office will eventually reveal, but while the new version isn’t quite the rewatchable classic the first movie was, it certainly has the goods over the sequels and virtually every other spoof movie released over the past twenty years.
However, possibly the most refreshing aspect of The Naked Gun is that it’s a sequel/reboot that rarely slips into the bad habits that brought down its forebearers. Yes, there’s parodies of other movies (the Mission: Impossible style sting gag is magnificent), but it doesn’t overdo them any more than it overdoes random celebrity cameos or callbacks to the originals. With that said, while Neeson’s full bodied foray into comedy may not reinvent the wheel (more like remembers it), I wouldn’t say no to further adventures of Police Squad with him at the wheel.
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