Early on in the new version of “The Naked Gun,” there’s a moment that gives you that old “Naked Gun” feeling. Sgt. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), a veteran L.A. cop of unorthodox methods (he has a casual relationship with the law, and also with keeping his pants on in public), has just surveyed the scene of a fatal car crash that may have involved foul play. It’s time for the wrecked car to be hauled away, so to accomplish that task they use a vehicle attached to what looks like a giant version of one of those mechanical claws in an arcade game. The claw lifts the car halfway up and then, at the crucial moment, drops it. The joke is that Drebin and his colleagues all let out a disappointed “Ohhhhhh!,” the way a million parents have when the claw guided by their 7-year-old drops the plushie toy it’s trying to hoist (as happens just about every time). In its patented absurdity, that gag scores a major laugh because it tickles a rib of recognition.
There are a handful of jokes that delirious in “The Naked Gun.” But maybe not enough of them. The new movie, directed by Akiva Schaffer of the Lonely Island brigade, from a script he wrote with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, is an engaging goofball grab bag, well-stocked with vintage terrible puns (“UCLA?” “I see it every day! I live here”), nicely detonated movie conventions (in the opening heist sequence, the villain’s henchman steals a remote control marked with the words “P.L.O.T. Device”), and serviceable running gags (Drebin keeps getting handed oversize cups of take-out coffee). All of that may be enough, in the eyes of many, to elevate “The Naked Gun” into the sort of “big-screen comedy we could all use right now,” not to mention a worthy successor to the original “Naked Gun” — a film that emerged, in 1988, out of the “Airplane!” school of conceptual media-age insanity invented by the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (ZAZ). At the time, those movies were often described as being fun in a “silly” way, as if they were just trivial diversions. And it’s true that they didn’t have a serious bone in their body.
Yet the beauty of the ZAZ school is that it used genre parody to take off on the whole wide world — of media and entertainment, of sex and politics and identity and everything else. In “The Naked Gun,” ZAZ drew specifically on the conventions of second-rate TV cop shows, and the film noirs that had fed them, to skewer the Hollywood clichés you didn’t even know were there. It was a movie about the way we watch movies, all held together by Leslie Nielsen, who played Drebin as an idiot cop who was also an innocently destructive force of nature. Nielsen, who seemed to be channeling Jack Webb, Ronald Reagan, and Moe Howard at the same time, elevated cocksure befuddlement into a weird form of enlightenment, turning the myopic absence of self-awareness into comic gold.
In the new “Naked Gun,” Liam Neeson plays the Nielsen character’s son, who is very different from his father. Where Nielson’s Drebin, in his loony-tunes straight-arrow way, was by-the-book, Neeson’s Drebin is a rogue officer, working for the Police Squad unit of the LAPD. He’s at once an update of Nielsen’s Drebin and a parody of all the cold-eyed vigilantes Neeson has played since his career was reinvented by “Taken” (2008). That may prove to be a commercially smart move — the idea of making a “Naked Gun” that’s a semi-satire of demagogic action movies (with a semi-visible comment on LAPD overkill). And Neeson’s lethal glare proves the jumping-off point for much skewed buffoonery. It’s fun to see that Drebin is an icy enforcer who’s also an addict for the Black Eyed Peas, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Sex and the City.” “Have you ever heard about Miranda rights?” he’s asked after having trashed police protocol. “I’m sure it’s Carrie who writes!” he replies.
Drebin is up against Richard Cane (Danny Huston), an electric-car tech entrepreneur who plans to unleash a toxic gas that will reduce everyone in the world to their “animal” state, thus allowing him to start civilization anew. Neeson’s Drebin, in the tradition of these films, is the cop as existential moron, living in the literal-minded moment. At a restaurant, when he has to make up a fake name for Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), the scat-singing femme fatale he’s trying to seduce and protect, he looks around the room for visual ideas and introduces her as “Miss Cherry Roosevelt Fat Bozo Chowing Down on Spaghetti.” But Neeson, game as he is to be used as a glowering found object, is not a natural comedian, and you can feel that. His Drebin doesn’t flow the way Nielsen’s did.
And the movie, in its hit-or-miss way, lacks the fundamental quality of aggression the ZAZ films had. Some of the genre parodies they influenced, like “Scary Movie,” had it too. “The Naked Gun” features a few edgy and violent bits: Drebin biting the heads off guns, a love montage (scored to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”) in which Drebin and Beth squirrel away in a winter hideaway, only to build a snowman that she brings to life through a book of witchcraft, and the snowman then becomes part of a ménage à trois…before turning into a stalker/slasher. There’s one inspired sequence — a bit out of kilter with the rest of the movie, but who’s complaining? — in which Drebin, filmed by his dashcam, scarfs chili dogs, and we see the intestinal calamity that results, along with the revelation of his sexual fetishes.
“The Naked Gun” has enough honest laughs to get by. But critics, reviewing comedy, are always searching for other words to use that mean “funny,” since there aren’t a whole lot of them. We tend to keep going back to the well of phrases like “hilarious,” “witty,” “amusing,” and “will make you chuckle.” On that score, the original “Naked Gun” was hilarious. It was a film that practically had audiences wetting their pants. The new “Naked Gun,” by contrast, is amusing. What it won’t do the way these movies once used to is shock you into laughter.
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From Variety US