The pleasure of the old Naked Gun films, which starred Leslie Nielsen in what amounted to an extended, elaborately silly riff on Dragnet, was that they were stupid. Proudly, defiantly, often brilliantly stupid. Just flat-out dumb, trafficking in humor that appealed directly to a specific type of obnoxiously smarty-pants 11-year-old boy brain.
But the cop farces, from legendary gag-comic filmmakers Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker, who also made Airplane!, were also stupid in a way that was so clever that eventually you realized that they were somehow, actually, very, very smart.
The good news, then, is that the new Naked Gun is also incredibly stupid. The reboot opens with an extended riff on the bank heist from The Dark Knight, except this time it's resolved when a petite schoolgirl with a lollipop skips into the bank and takes off a mask, Mission: Impossible style, to reveal that she's actually a full-size Liam Neeson—who then proceeds to dispatch the bad guys with a murder lollipop and a dose of Matrix fu, all while wearing an uncomfortably short skirt.
This might even be the worst extended sequence in the movie. The references feel a little dated and the action sight gags don't achieve quite the level of chaotic hilarity of the best of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. But like those old Naked Gun films it is defiantly silly in a way that sets the tone for the rest of the blessedly short movie.
The new Naked Gun is not just stupid but disarmingly stupid, a movie so insistently dumb that it breaks down your mental barriers to laughing at such lowbrow material. You kind of have to admire it.
Most of all, you have to admire Liam Neeson'a deadpan performance as Frank Drebin, Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen's deadpan detective from the original films. Neeson plays even the absolute silliest material perfectly straight, his gravely voice and cockeyed scowl adding to the film's absurdist dissonance. There is something practically sublime about watching the man nominated for an Academy Award for playing Oskar Schindler engage in pun-packed dad-joke banter. A Musk-like billionaire asks about a suspicious death involving an electric car, "Do you suspect something foul?" Neeson's Drebin responds with perfect brusqueness: "No, I don't think a chicken could have done this."
Reader, I laughed. I'm still laughing.
The movie's real strength is not in its Wick-winking action-sequence sight gags—although there's a recurring bit with coffee cups that gets funnier as the film goes on—but in its wordplay, it's constant twisting of the English language into goofy reversals and confusions. As with the original Naked Gun films, there is something also Becketian about the dialogue; everyone is constantly misinterpreting each other. Fundamentally, it's a movie about cthe ontortions and confusions of language, and the humorous possibilities therein.
It's also blessedly apolitical, even when touching on subjects that might have been vehicles for smarmy clapper. Yes, there's that Musk-like electric-car entrepreneur played by Danny Huston, who, with a straight face, invites Neeson to a private club where, he says, men of a certain stature can make like the Black Eyed Peas and "get retarded in here." And yes, there are occasional nods to police abuse and misconduct, including an especially good throwaway gag featuring a cop dragging some school-age kids through the station—along with their lemonade-for-sale sign. There is even, briefly, an O.J. joke. We don't need to discuss it further.
Much of the movie's strength lies in its throwback appeal—its refusal, beyond a handful of modern movie references, to update the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker formula or adopt a contemporary pose. But that's also its biggest weakness. Those old Naked Gun films could work for anyone with a sufficiently goofball sense of humor, and there were certainly gags that only adults would really appreciate. But they were squarely aimed at too-smart-for-their-own-good 11-year-olds. The new one is aimed at those same 11-year-olds, who are now well over 40.
Maybe this was inevitable. The old Naked Gun films assumed a huge amount of shared cultural knowledge, mostly derived from Hollywood. It's hard to know what sort of widely shared references one could assume about younger viewers brought up in a more fragmented, and less movie-centric, pop-culture landscape. Marvel movies might fit the bill, but with Deadpool, that franchise has already satirized itself.
The Naked Gun nods to its aging sensibility with a self-satisfied monologue about the vitality and power of old men. Neeson, who is now in his 70s, delivers it with a knowing, deadpan smirk. It's funny. But it's also a little worrying.
No doubt there are reference-heavy, joke-dense, extravagantly silly, goofball comedy productions actually aimed at those younger viewers, probably lodged somewhere in the algorithmic bowels of YouTube. But the idea that this once-youthful form of comedy is now primarily for grizzled old men—well, it's kind of stupid.
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