Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun comes up big on laughs, even if its aim isn’t on par with the original, and proves Pamela Anderson as a comedic force.
Liam Neeson is not the first name that comes to mind when it comes to comedy. (Although I saw a tweet saying it’s close enough to the name “Leslie Nielsen” that that’s why The Naked Gun producers went with him.) However, in recent years, he’s proven to be quite funny, especially with his cameo in Ted 2 (Is this where The Naked Gun producer Seth MacFarlane put two and two together?).
But of course, Leslie Nielsen wasn’t a comedic actor at first either, and it wasn’t until he was cast in Airplane! that Hollywood learned they were sitting on a hidden gem.
I’m not sure the new Naked Gun will spawn a series of sequels and revival of parody films (my personal favorite is 1998’s Wrongfully Accused), but writer/director Akiva Schaffer and screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand capture the spirit of the OG franchise (even if we don’t get the theme song until the end credits!).
The plot doesn’t really matter except to say Liam Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., son of Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Derbin, who works with a series of other neo baby policemen, including Paul Walter Hauser as Captain Ed Hocken Jr., whose father was George Kennedy’s Ed Hocken in the original.
All of the actors are definitely game to play in this world, but the one who comes tailor-made for this role is Pamela Anderson. She understands the assignment, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she would have been like with Leslie Nielsen. They were in 2008’s Superhero Movie together, but she *gets* the tone and rhythm of this film more than any other actor.
Not to say that Neeson isn’t good! He eventually warms up on screen, and by the time we get to what I will only dub “the Chili Dog scene,” he completely owns the ridiculousness. Another standout scene is when Frank and Beth (Anderson) go away for the weekend to the tune of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and it takes a sinister, random turn that feels very Family Guy-coded.
But the problem lies in the pace. At 85 minutes, it feels rushed at the end and makes you wonder if there’s a different, longer version of this film somewhere. Where the original churns out laugh after laugh in every scene, some jokes don’t land, and in a world where TikTok parodies something daily, it’s hard for Naked Gun, originally created to parody cop shows and films, to lampoon anything in a fun, fresh way (especially when cops are viewed differently than they were 40 years ago). In one joke, Neeson runs into someone he arrested and whittles down who he was according to his race — and how he “treated” him during the arrest. It’s an edgy joke in an otherwise relatively tame film, but it’s a movie I wanted to see more of.
Naked Gun is in theaters everywhere August 1.
