More than 30 years after its last installment, The Naked Gun shot back into theaters this weekend. So far, no injuries have been reported.
For many, The Naked Gun will be the comedy of the year and a laugh riot. Some reviews are even calling it the funniest movie in years. I remember similar reviews for Friendship earlier this year.
The brass tacks is that it will all come down to your sense of humor. I haven’t seen the original films, but I’ve seen Airplane and Wrongfully Accused and can confidently say fans of the major works of Leslie Nielsen are very likely going to have a blast in this film.
The humor is absurd, silly, stupid—everything you want and expect from a movie in this series. There are visual gags, sight gags, puns, and dad jokes, and they all come in rapid succession. The plot is nothing more than a framework for jokes. Personally, the hit rate on those jokes was not as high as it is for others, but I still found myself grinning and having a good time.
Liam Neeson capably steps into Nielsen’s shoes, though nobody could be expected to replicate the iconic delivery of the legend himself. And thanks in part to their viral new relationship, Neeson has great chemistry with Pamela Anderson in the femme fatale role.
If the trailers were a bit annoying with their heavy focus on the schoolgirl in the bank scene, it’s gratefully because that is the opening scene, saving many of the film’s best jokes from appearing in the marketing material.
The story hardly matters, but we follow Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. as Police Squad is in danger of shutting down. Drebin’s incompetence gets him kicked off the bank robbery case and onto a car crash that is at first ruled a suicide, until Drebin comes to suspect that the two cases may actually be related.
All of this, of course, unfolds in the silliest and perhaps dumbest way possible, and Drebin is bound to wrap things up by the end of the film through sheer dumb luck. The homages fly fast and furious, including a visual gag partially shown in the trailer that mimics the Austin Powers scene of innocuous shenanigans casting very naughty images in shadow.
While I had a good enough time in the theater, I came away feeling like it was just a middle-of-the-road film, certainly not the funniest thing I have seen in theaters even this year. But that may be just my humor frequency, and also the fact that I saw this alone with my father with no audience to give it a more infectious energy.
Despite my score, I’m recommending everyone to go see this one in theaters and decide for themselves.
