Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. in the gloriously giddy new take on The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.Photo Credit: Frank Masi/Supplied
The Naked Gun
Directed by Akiva Schaffer
Written by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Cody Rhodes, Liza Koshy, Eddie Yu, with Danny Huston
Classification 14A; 85 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 1
Critic’s Pick
Are you completely done with tired Hollywood reboots that cynically milk what affection we have for movies from the past? Well not so fast, says the gloriously giddy new take on The Naked Gun. This locked and loaded return to David Zucker’s late-80s police procedural parody has Liam Neeson step into late Canadian icon Leslie Nielsen’s hilariously oblivious gumshoe role as the latter’s equally clueless son, and makes for a convincing response to any blanket dismissal of bastardized IP: “Not all reboots!”
The Naked Gun has an advantage, of course. Time and distance are on the side of a franchise that dates all the way back to when one of its stars, O.J. Simpson, was still a wholesome household name (the new movie has a quick and brilliant acknowledgment of its relationship to that sordid history). Meanwhile, the multiplexes have been starved for laughs in a landscape overcrowded with superhero movies and other like-minded franchises.
Comedies tend to go directly to streaming, while spoofs such as the Austin Powers and Scary Movie franchises have gone AWOL for the better part of a decade. “More and more comedies go unmade,” says Neeson, instructing audiences to head back to theatres in a Naked Gun marketing PSA played as both spoof and sincere. Audiences would do well to heed the sincerity.
You probably remember Neeson turning heads nearly two decades ago when his career transitioned from more intense dramatic roles (Schindler’s List, Rob Roy) to B-movie action. Not that he ever ditched the intensity, which now, in yet another unexpected turn, is played for joyous laughs. His granite stare and gravelly voice as Frank Drebin Jr. (as opposed to Nielsen’s soothing baritone) just makes the chaotic silliness enveloping him that much funnier.
The contrast, casting dramatic actors in deadpan roles, was of course key to what Zucker was doing in his spoofs – before the ’88 Naked Gun, there was Police Squad! (the series the movie franchise was borne from) and Airplane!, in which Nielsen made his own unexpected transition into comedy.
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The new Naked Gun isn’t reinventing the formula. Popstar director Akiva Schaffer, alongside his co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, opt instead to stay true to what made the original work so spectacularly well, like exhaustively lobbing as many gags as they can at the screen at once, so that if one falls flat, there’s often a background detail earning a chuckle to cover it; or insistently pushing bits that are too silly to earn a reaction at first – such as a magical snowman joining a threesome – until they derail into magnificent absurdity.
The most consistent laughs are lifted from Drebin Jr.’s literal-minded approach to language, clueless to the tropes and assumptions we casually lean on in conversation, and misinterpreting the world-at-large in relentlessly gut-busting ways. “Drunk?” asks a uniformed officer observing the fatal wreckage after a car had been driven off a cliff. “Just enough to wake me up,” responds Neeson’s Drebin 2.0.
His character is introduced in an opening bank heist scene riffing on The Dark Knight, Schaffer treating it with some of the gravity Christopher Nolan would. It’s a cold open, where Schaffer makes it clear he can pull off a pretty great imitation of slick action blockbusters, but he’d much rather squeeze Neeson into a schoolgirl outfit and floral panties as he dispatches bad guys. As basement dwelling as some of these gags are, just know that Schaffer is often choreographing them as precisely as a John Wick fight, narrowly pulling back punches and landing punchlines instead.
Pamela Anderson, with that squeaky pitch in her voice, muffled by the whispery way she speaks, plays Beth Davenport in the new Naked Gun.Photo Credit: Frank Masi/Supplied
Like any spoof worth its salt, there’s an affection for the films and filmmaking that The Naked Gun emulates. It’s one thing to riff on the hard-boiled detective stories that the original would send up, but quite another to approximate the noir vibes so well that the stars can have a good time convincingly inhabiting that space. That doesn’t just go for Neeson, as gritty an actor as they come, but also Danny Huston (the son of Asphalt Jungle director John Huston, and playing a Musk-like tech bro villain) and Pamela Anderson.
The latter is enjoying a renaissance of late with her recent memoirs and vulnerable performance in The Last Showgirl, pushing back against the way the industry objectifies and then casts aside women when they reach a certain age. Her appearance in The Naked Gun is a lovely addition to that narrative. She’s here with that squeaky pitch in her voice, muffled by the whispery way she speaks, which works great in a femme fatale performance that can register as both camp and heartfelt.
If Anderson fits like a glove in the new Naked Gun, it’s because her durability is as pleasantly unexpected as this franchise that’s refusing to heed the memo that reboots suck and studio comedy is dead.
