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The Naked Gun


This uncalled for remake of 1988's The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is not a patch on the original, nor the TV show, Police Squad! that spawned them both. Director Akiva Schaffer has plenty of pedigree with stupid comedy, having directed oodles of Saturday Night Live episodes, as well as films like Hot Rod and The Watch. I haven't seen these films but I'm not about to now.

The new Naked Gun has a fairly rapid rate of jokes - many successful - in the first 30 minutes or so, but once the film had to start servicing the plot, the laughs dried up. Throughout the film, the sight gags didn't work as well as the straight-faced wordplay, à la the 'awfully big mustache' classic from The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. This might be due to the casting. Liam Neeson is fun and tries hard, but he doesn't get anywhere near Leslie Nielsen, though I thought Pamela Anderson was an improvement on Priscilla Presley (I guess being an actual actor helps).


About that 'plot' - I'll be brief. Danny Huston's Richard Cane has probably had the brother of Beth Davenport (Anderson) killed. Bro apparently got too close to Cane's plans for a societal reset. Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson - yes, he's the son of Nielsen's Drebin) stumbles and brawns his way through the case. Look, a film like this lives or dies by its guffaws, and I think the preview audience got their fill, the ones around me seemed to, at any rate. Let's see how it does with paying customers.


It's a shame David and Jerry Zucker couldn't have been brought in to write the jokes - sadly, the third member of the group, Jim Abrahams died in 2024. I actually rewatched the original the night after seeing the new one to confirm it was that much better. Sure, Nielsen carries a lot of the load, but the jokes landed better and the absurdity of the situations felt more at odds with the supposed seriousness of the story. And everyone plays it straight as a die, especially Nielsen, but also Ricardo Montalban and George Kennedy (only the part-timers Presley and O.J. Simpson - yep, that one - let the tone down a touch). In contrast, Neeson, Anderson, et al, in 2025 seem to be offering the audience a bit of the old 'nudge, nudge' most of the time.


The crucial, likely unavoidable, problem is that the first TV show and film were pastiches of earlier po-faced police shows and films. Much like Flying High (Airplane!) was almost a remake of the 1957 film, Zero Hour. This new film, though, is a copy of a copy, without a reference to anything real. There's no base text to spoof. Sure, there's a new audience who haven't seen the original films but will they have any frame of reference at all? Are the filmmakers gambling that dumb for dumb's sake is enough? Or are they relying on nostalgia from us over 50s filmgoers? I guess the Box Office is the litmus test.

The Naked Gun opens around Australia on August 21st.

See also:

The ZAZ team (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) were responsible for some of the goofiest comedies of the 80s. Flying High (Airplane!) (1980), and Top Secret (1984), written and directed by all three are two of the best. Incidentally, most countries used the Airplane! title, but here in Australia, we went for Flying High. Also, Top Secret was the film debut for lead, Val Kilmer.

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