The Naked Gun: Funnier Than the Original? Surely We Can't Be Serious!
By Chris Knight
Rating: A
They say that comedy is all about timing. I’d argue that, in the movies at least, it’s also contingent on casting.
Take Leslie Nielsen. The late great Canadian actor got his start in the 1950s as a serious actor. Heck, in 1961 he played Lieutenant Price Adams in The New Breed, a TV cop show. And I know you’re thinking: Surely it can’t have been serious! Well it was.
But everything changed when he starred in 1980’s Airplane! as a stone-cold, deadpan, deeply hilarious doctor aboard a doomed aircraft. Roger Ebert called him “the Olivier of spoofs.” He never looked back, except to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his hand-held fart toy.
Well, if Nielsen was ribald satire’s Olivier, then Liam Neeson is its Kenneth Branagh, a next-generation Northern Irish comic genius. (Fun false fact: Liam Neeson and Leslie Nielsen are anagrams!)
He too has his serious side. When Nielsen was making Airplane!, Neeson was gearing up to appear in The Bounty, which also featured Olivier. During Nielson’s Naked Gun trilogy, Neeson was starring in the likes of Schindler’s List and Michael Collins. The same year that Nielsen appeared in Superhero Movie alongside Pamela Anderson, Neeson was segueing from dramatic lead to action hero with Taken.
I can think of exactly two other times he’s been funny. Once was in TV’s Life’s Too Short in 2011, doing improv opposite Ricky Gervais and not letting go of his character having AIDS. The other was four years later in Ted 2, where he buys a box of Trix, gravely explaining that even though they’re “for kids,” he is not a child, and he fears legal repercussions for his purchase.
The Naked Gun is the third time, and I hope it’s not the last. Co-written and directed by Akiva Schaffer of The Lonely Island fame, it stars Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Neeson’s character from TV’s Police Squad! and its three Naked Gun spinoffs.
Dedicated and dimwitted in roughly equal measure, Drebin is on the trail of supervillain Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who in the opening sequence steals an electronic MacGuffin from a safety deposit box. His goons destroy three walls of the bank vault where it’s been kept. Neeson immediately breaks the fourth.
Drebin’s partner in crime (fighting) is Ed Hocken Jr.,, son of George Kennedy’s character in the earlier Naked Gun movies, and played by Paul Walter Hauser. An excellent accomplice, he finishes Drebin’s interior monologues and shoulders half the film’s insane coffee cup budget. There isn’t a scene where someone doesn’t hand them a fresh cup, even when physically impossible.
He’s also joined by Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport, a femme fatale cut from roughly the same cloth as Priscilla Presley’s character in the first Naked Gun. (Her stuffed beaver, one of the goofier gags in that movie, gets a cameo.)
Beth’s brother has been killed in a crash of one of Cane’s electric cars. (“Drunk?” someone asks at the crash site. Drebin replies: “Just enough to get me moving in the morning.”) And so the two of them are tracking the same suspect. I expected them to fall in love. I was surprised by the snowman three-way.
And fine, I won’t spoil any more jokes. Suffice to say this Naked Gun packs an Airplane!’s worth of sight gags, non-sequiturs, malapropisms and misunderstood lines into a rapid-fire, comedy-friendly 85 minutes, the exact (and perfect!) timing of the 1988 original.
There were a few moments where audience laughter drowned out the next joke, so I guess I may have to see it again, but I won’t begrudge one second of the experience.
Oh, and Cane’s electronic gizmo? It’s a device called the Primordial Law of Toughness, or PLOT.
Very clever. This Cinephile Routinely Investigating The Inane and Comedic is impressed. The Naked Gun is giddy as charged.
The Naked Gun. Directed by Akiva Schaffer. Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, and Danny Huston. In theatres August 1.