Is ‘The Naked Gun’ the Most Important Movie of the Year?
This article contains minor spoilers for The Naked Gun.
Generally speaking, there aren’t all that many out-and-out studio comedies that make it to movie theaters anymore. Just this year, look at Happy Gilmore 2, the long-awaited sequel to a beloved Adam Sandler joint—and yet relegated to straight to streaming fodder. While campy and fun, most would probably describe M3GAN 2.0 as a horror film. The Minecraft Movie might’ve had tweens bowled over worldwide, but that was first-and-foremost a video game adaptation. And the macabre humor of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme would hardly see it described as a barrel of laughs.
Laugh-a-minute romps like Knocked Up, Superbad and Bridesmaids—once year-round comic treats, in the same way we now get a new horror movie every couple of weeks—just don’t make it to the multiplex now, at least not as frequently as their ’90s and 2000s heyday. One sub-genre that has been hit particularly hard, since it peaked with Austin Powers and the Scary Movie series? The spoof, perfected by Mel Brooks and David Zucker, and sullied by the likes of Epic Movie and Vampires Suck.
But comically inclined readers, let me be clear: we are so, so back. For which we have The Naked Gun to thank—the sequel, reboot, and spiritual successor to the ’80s Leslie Nielsen cop parodies based on the 1982 sitcom Police Squad! Director Akiva Schaffer, of the Lonely Island fame, is a modern spoofster whose hit rate with the genre is remarkably strong, from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping to Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers. And with The Naked Gun, he’s completely nailed it, from the silly tone to the bawdy sense of humor to the surreal sight gags.
What the worst spoof-makers have usually forgotten is that parodies are supposed to lovingly send up of the movies and genres they target; it’s a rule of comedy at large, really, because who likes punching down? Conversely, The Naked Gun isn’t just steeped in reverence for its Zucker-Nielsen forebearer. It’s full of love for pulp detective stories, police procedurals, noir flicks and hardboiled coppers—a tough sell in the era of Defund the Police, and yet one it convincingly gets over the line. After all, the Naked Gun movies have never depicted law enforcement as especially competent.
Like the original Naked Gun, Schaffer’s film follows a variously inept, maverick, and bafflingly fortunate cop, this time played by Liam Neeson, whose knack for self-effacing comedy will be a revelation for most. (The jokes that would’ve already been good are made more hilarious, at least for the first half-hour or so, because we think of Neeson as such a somber actor. That preconception is entirely erased by the end of the film’s generously tight 85-minute runtime.) He has inherited his spot on Los Angeles’s prestigious Police Squad from his father, Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin (the late Leslie Nielsen), who is homaged early on in a sequence that also ribs the first Naked Gun’s association with O.J. Simpson. Within the first five or ten minutes, I had laughed—like, properly belly laughed—as many times.
If it feels like I’m writing around specifics, it’s because you should go into The Naked Gun as unaware as possible of the gags. (Just like horror, comedy is so much less effective without the element of surprise.) But here’s a sample of the humor you should expect. In the movie’s opening, Neeson smuggles himself into an ongoing bank heist disguised as a cute little girl with a lolliop, which includes shrinking down to kid size; honestly, Ethan Hunt would be jealous. (He later weaponizes that lollipop in a sequence that apes John Wick.) The movie’s MacGuffin is called the “P.L.O.T. Device.” The cold cases room at the police department is literally a walk-in freezer. There’s a brilliant recurring joke wherein Drebin and his partner Ed (Paul Walter Hauser) are almost never seen without a cup of coffee in their hand, sending up the trope of the caffeine-addled noir detective. And in one incredibly stupid moment—which, nonetheless, made me laugh more than anything else I’ve seen at the cinema this year—Drebin is driving along in the middle of a dour internal monologue when, out of nowhere, he hits some poor sap on a bike… and just goes on monologuing.
Truthfully, the first half of the movie is one of the most satisfyingly hilarious experiences I’ve had at the big screen in forever. It’s a little less generous with the jokes in the second half, when it gets stuck in the inevitable need for “a plot,” and veers momentarily into surreal dream sequence territory, which sees Drebin and love interest Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, excellent) engage in a holiday tryst with a snowman they bring to life via witchcraft. (Is that a sentence I just wrote? Or are you merely hallucinating? Who’s to tell?) There’s also a dash of forced timeliness in that its villain is an overtly Muskian tech giant (Danny Huston) who wants to send most of the world’s population into a murderous rage via phone signals, leaving the earth to be repopulated by his chosen few—yeah, yeah, very Kingsman. But the laughs are still plentiful, brilliantly vulgar, and oh so perfectly stupid. And maybe the movie will prove to be the shot in the arm that theatrical comedy has long needed.
This article originally appeared in British GQ.
