It’s one of the sweetest sounds in the world: a movie theater full of people laughing. And I mean really laughing. Not just the occasional chuckles of humor-laced action flicks, or the gentle giggles of rom-coms, or even the droll chuckles of playful indies. I mean the long, loud belly laughs generated by an honest-to-goodness comedy whose sole purpose is to make a packed audience lose its shit. American studios tend not to produce those kinds of pictures anymore, at least for theatrical release, and that should probably be a crime: True comedy is best appreciated with an audience.
The new Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. (the son of the original series’ hero, who was played by the late great Leslie Nielsen, a man whose name could be Liam Neeson if you were really drunk), might go some way toward remedying Hollywood’s current allergy to straight comedies. Directed and co-written by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer and co-produced by Seth MacFarlane, the film has the same see-what-sticks gusto of the originals with a thankfully high ratio of hits to misses. I’m sure they’ve tested it to death: It’s a tight 89 minutes with almost no laugh-free stretches. Even the end credits feature a few decent jokes: Among all those names in the closing scroll is a Netflix password (“embiidsknees76!!”) and an optician’s chart.
As the stone-faced and boneheaded man’s man Frank, Neeson makes fine use of the stoic presence that has graced so many compellingly sleazy action films over the past couple of decades. The star was getting a bit too old to go around maiming and murdering faceless baddies in recent years; his last several thrillers mostly confined him to cars and trucks. Now, his lumbering physicality and raspy voice add to the humor. The extremely funny opening scene, prominently featured in the previews, has Frank foiling a gritty, Dark Knight–style bank robbery by posing as a tiny little schoolgirl. You’ve probably seen these gags, since the ads have been ubiquitous: Frank tearing off his sweet little girl’s face to reveal Neeson’s glowering visage; Frank, still in his schoolgirl dress, stabbing and killing thugs with his lollipop stick. A couple of bits the trailer doesn’t show you: Frank biting off and chewing the barrel of one robber’s gun like a cookie; Frank rolling another robber like a bowling ball into the others, prompting them all to collapse like pins (complete with sound effects). These may not be original sight gags, but combined with the 73-year-old Neeson’s gravelly bounce, they achieve comic alchemy.
The film also has fun with Frank’s dinosaur attitudes. Like all good veteran cops in cop movies (and certainly like Frank Sr. in the originals), he bemoans the way things are changing. “Since when do cops have to follow the law?” he laments to his boss (CCH Pounder). Looking at an electric car, he grumbles, “I remember when the only things that were electric were eels, chairs, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago.” Outdated machismo has long been a trademark of cop tales, even serious ones, but it’s fun to imagine certain humorless viewers getting outraged by this picture’s nods to police violence, to knee-jerk reactionaryism, to its weirdo billionaire villains. (Will the crypto bros take offense at the film’s climax at Los Angeles’s famed Ponzi-Scheme.com Arena? If so, their loss.) The main bad guy, Richard Kane (Danny Huston), is an electric car magnate (his company slogan: “We make impossible solutions for a doomed world”) with a private club where you can proudly use the term “retarded.” His devious and insane plan is predictably based on his belief that the world has gotten too soft.
For all their comic abandon, Schaffer & Co. do have to walk a surprisingly fine line here. The original Naked Gun movies were themselves rarities in their day. They were spoofs that didn’t rely on referentiality; they weren’t interested in trying to parody specific films or prove their superiority to other pictures. Much like their earlier Airplane! hits, the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams used a popular genre as an excuse to try out every stupid idea in their heads. The result was a motley mix of humor: wordplay, slapstick, satire, deadpan, sight gags, surrealism, gross-out, topical, as well as random non sequiturs. Not all of it worked, but that was the point: The jokes that landed stood out more because of the ones that didn’t. The go-for-broke effort was part of the charm; the filmmakers’ eagerness to disarm you was what disarmed you.
The new movie does the same with throwaway bits of dialogue (“I guess you can’t fight City Hall.” “No, it’s a building”) and quick visual gags (little kids frog-marched through a police station, under arrest for their lemonade stand) living alongside longer, more involved strays into weirdness (a romantic montage spins off into a deranged subplot involving a psychotic snowman). The structure remains the same as the original Naked Gun, but the new film has fun coloring inside and outside familiar lines. As the obligatory femme fatale–slash–damsel in distress who romances Frank while trying to get him to solve the death of her brother, Pamela Anderson thankfully gets to do more than just poke fun at her sexpot persona.
Paul Walter Hauser, as Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (son of the late, equally great George Kennedy’s character from the previous movies), gets to be a straight man for once, and his understated line deliveries aid the humor immensely.
Like its previous iterations, The Naked Gun builds to a grand comic finale, though this one never quite achieves the climactic delirium of the original. (There can be only one Enrico Pallazzo.) But overall, what’s most surprising is how fully in tune the new film remains with the spirit of the earlier ones. Paramount has been trying to reboot this franchise for years, with their efforts constantly getting hung up on concerns over outdatedness and sensitivity: Spoofs were old hat; cop flicks were forgotten; these types of jokes were too vulgar; blah, blah, blah. Now, things have finally gotten to the point where movie comedy itself feels like an anachronism. But here comes The Naked Gun, unabashedly crude and stupid and brilliant and weird and obvious and current and archaic and, finally, fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious. See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.
