22 hours ago
5
Here is Liam Neeson doing a rumbly-menacing voice even sillier than the one he did in Taken – and he now presumably must decide whether, like Leslie Nielsen before him, he will pivot to spoof comedy full-time. To be fair, Neeson has more career capital to lose than Nielsen did. He deadpans it impeccably, but perhaps doesn’t quite have Nielsen’s eerie innocence. In any case, it doesn’t stop this reboot of the Naked Gun franchise from being a lot of fun: amiably ridiculous, refreshingly shallow, entirely pointless and guilelessly crass. It is a life-support system for some outrageous gags, including sensational riffs on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sex and the City, and one showstopping are-they-really-gonna-do-it reference to OJ Simpson, who featured in the original films.
David Zucker, co-creator of those and the Airplane! films, is reportedly dissatisfied with this new version from the team of director Akiva Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. A spoof of a spoof is always going to be a potential problem, but Schaffer et al canter entertainingly through their succession of absurdist scenarios – and at one stage contrive a classic Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker homage: a moment of mayhem followed by a wide-shot of people queueing up obediently for violence, like Airplane!’s line of (hitherto unseen) passengers.
Neeson plays Det Lt Frank Drebin Jr, who is the son of the LA cop once played by Nielsen, and haunted in a rather Freudian way by his late father’s reputation. He is given to making yearning monologues addressed to Drebin Sr’s presence, begging him to send a sign “like an owl or something”. Paul Walter Hauser plays his stolid partner Capt Ed Hocken Jr, son of Drebin Sr’s partner who was once played by George Kennedy. The next-gen Drebin investigates the possible murder of a man found dead at the wheel of a hi-tech electric car, and must confront the sinister Muskalike plutocrat who invented this vehicle; this is Richard Cane, played by Danny Huston.
Drebin then falls in love with the dead man’s sister Beth, a true-crime novelist played by Pamela Anderson. When Drebin first sees Beth, he has an ecstatic voiceover about what I can only describe as her person; it finishes with a quite extraordinarily bizarre and offensive tribute which caused the audience I was in to go into gibbering shock. The memory of this amusing line recurred like PTSD throughout the film’s running time.
The new Naked Gun has the look and feel of an 80s LA action movie, with sense-memories of Beverly Hills Cop and Terminator. The first rush of Frank and Beth’s romance is represented by an uproariously extended winter-sports-themed pop video of the sort beloved by Wham! fans. There is no reason for this new Naked Gun to exist other than the reason for the old ones: it’s a laugh, disposable, forgettable, enjoyable.
