The Broken Promise (Dead Men Don’t Laugh)

My thoughts on The Naked Gun

Of the three genre parodies written and directed by the filmmaking triumvirate of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker during their heyday in the 1980s, I would have to say that the last of the three, 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, the big-screen adaptation of Police Squad! their brilliant but very short-lived 1982 TV series spoofing 60s/70s-era cop shows was also the least. I hasten to add, however, that the film was nevertheless genuinely hilarious and this ranking is due at least in part to the fact that one of them has to be last and I prefer both their classic 1980 disaster film spoof Airplane! and Top Secret, the even funnier 1984 masterpiece that goofed on both World War II movies and Elvis Presley vehicles (and wound up paying the price for that ambition the box-office when it turned out that the target audience wasn’t especially familiar with those genres to realize how expertly they were being skewered) when all is said and done. That said, the film as a whole remains funnier than about 90% of the American screen comedies that has emerged since its release and it still reduces me to fits of helpless laughter to this day. (To this day, all you have to do to inspire laughing fits in certain people is say the name “Enrico Pallazzo”

That said, there are two good film critic-like reasons why The Naked Gun was maybe a step behind its predecessors. For one thing, while their previous efforts were riffing on overtly cinematic conventions, it took many of its cues from the conventions of factory-style television productions (including cheap backlot locations and overly familiar guest stars) that didn’t quite translate to the multiplex. For another thing, although not enough people had seen Police Squad! during its truncated run to notice, those who did see it recognized that the ZAZ guys reused a lot of the jokes originally seen there for the film. That said, the film was still a very funny work and enough of a success to inspire a pair of sequels, The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994), both of which contained enough funny moments to make them worth watching, though by the time the last one came around, it was driven more by the indefatigable presence of Leslie Nielsen as the blissfully clueless Lt. Frank Drebin, whose commitment to the bit after all that time was admirable, and viewer suspense regarding the by-now-traditional cameo appearance by Weird Al Yankovic. (That said, the final shot of The Final Insult would demonstrate an eerie sense of precognition about what was to come just a few months after it hit theaters.)

By the time that last installment arrived in theaters, the ZAZ guys had long since gone their separate filmmaking ways and while there would occasionally be rumors of attempts to get a fourth film off of the ground, nothing ever became of them. Since it would have been extremely unlikely that the guys would have gotten back together in the first place, this was probably for the best. After all, many people in the wake of the success of Airplane! had attempted to follow in their footsteps with their own spoofs (including Jim Abrahams with the uneven Hot Shots! films and Jane Austen’s Mafia and David Zucker with the later installment in the Scary Movie franchise) and while they were able to more or less replicate the form of that title, they were not able to recreate the sense of manic invention and anything goes-style of humor that it displayed in spades. This was most evident in 1982’s infamous Airplane II: The Sequel (a project that the ZAZ guys turned down), a film that had an inspired opening 10 minutes and a funny cameo in the closing minutes from William Shatner that ended up bookending what was mostly just retellings of the same jokes viewers had laughed at a couple of years earlier.

You might have thought that the lesson learned from that misbegotten enterprise—that trying to replicate someone else’s unique and particular comedic sensibility despite not having much of an evident feel or understanding of it—would have ensured that no one would have been foolhardy enough to attempt such a thing again and for a long time, it seemed as if this particular lesson actually stuck. Alas, we live in a time when any piece of studio IP is considered fair game, whether it is actually a good idea or not, and so now we have The Naked Gun to contend with. Technically this iteration is not a remake per se—like many recent films along these lines such as the recent I Know What You Did Last Summer, it is a so-called “requel” that serves both as a sequel and a reboot to its predecessors. Alas, the result is a generally wan and unfunny piece of tedium that largely replicates the form of the earlier films without bringing anything new or consistently amusing to the table—not only is it not nearly as funny as any of the previous Naked Gun films, it doesn’t inspire the same amount of laughs found in the aforementioned I Know What You Did Last Summer and that one wasn’t even trying to be funny in the first place.

The focus this time around is on Frank Drebin Jr., played here by none other than Liam Neeson, perhaps because his name sounds kind of like what you might get if Frank Sr. were ever required to say the name “Leslie Nielsen.” Like his old man, Drebin works at Police Squad, a special department of the LAPD that is evidently dedicated to solving the crimes that the regular police can’t be bothered with, with his partner, Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), the son of the character played in the films by George Kennedy. (It seems that Police Squad consists entirely of legacies, a conceit that inspires one of the film’s funniest jokes, albeit one that the trailers have already blown.) After his attempts to thwart an opening bank robbery go awry, Drebin, along with Hocken, are assigned to investigate a seemingly ordinary car crash. One thing leads to another and as Drebin struggles to piece the clues together (among other things), he stumbles along a labyrinthine plot that finds him at various points trapped inside a remote-controlled electric car, framed for a murder that he didn’t commit and trying to stop a diabolical plot to destroy the minds of thousands of MMA fans during a big New Year’s Eve brawl.

Since trying to analyze the plot of a film like this is where madness lies, I will not even attempt to explain it in any further detail. Instead, I will mention a couple of the additional characters that Drebin encounters in his dogged-yet-dim-witted pursuit of justice. Of course, there is a bad guy in the form of Richard Cane (Danny Huston, sounding almost disconcertingly like his old man at times here), a rich and powerful technological genius with a secret plan to rid the world of those he deems to be inferior so that he and his similarly wealthy buddies can forge a new and pure existence. Now I am not going to say that this particular character is meant to suggest any real-life analogues, though I will point out that his right-hand man so closely resembles Elon Musk at times that I found myself wondering if this was how Kevin Durand, the actor playing him, really looked or if there had been some futzing around to make the similarity even more pronounced. Of course, there is also a damsel in distress in the form of Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson in the follow-up to her acclaimed turn in The Last Showgirl), an author of true-crime fiction, of a sort, who is also the sister of the guy killed in that car crash who is certain that he met with foul play. Whether or not Weird Al turns up, I will leave for you to discover, though I would suggest that if you do elect to see this film, you should definitely stay throughout the end credits.

Of course, in the three decades or so since the release of the last Naked Gun films, there have been numerous shifts in attitudes regarding cops in both popular culture and in real life and one might have thought that a new film would have taken advantage of them in order to mine for new nuggets of humor. The notion of Drebin bumbling his way through through scenes inspired by the self-serious copaganda of the various iterations of the CSI and Law & Order franchises or the sprawling crime epics of Michael Mann sounds reasonably promising and could have given the film the kind of new comedic spin it so desperately needed. Although the opening heist sequence evoking Mann’s Heat suggests that it might lean in that direction, it soon settles into the same groove as the earlier films but you never get the same sense of bemused affection for the old tropes and conceits that helped fuel the ZAZ efforts—it seems as if the only connection that the creators of this film, including co-writer/director Akiva Schiffer and co-producer Seth MacFarlane, have with those old narrative comes exclusively through the spoof versions and all they can really do is offer up more of the same stuff as before, only from a further distance.

As for the jokes themselves, they come at viewers in the usual rapid-fire manner and cover as many bases as possible, ranging from dad jokes (“UCLA?” “I see it every day. I live here”) to jokes that might inspire uncomfortable discussions between dads and their young children on the ride home from the theater. There are sight gags, pratfall, puns, pop culture spoofs, jokes involving most of the ickier basic bodily functions, surprise cameo appearances and moments of pure surrealism (the latter best exemplified in a sequence, set to Starship’s “Nothing’s Going to Stop Us Now” that begins as a winter getaway between Drebin and Beth and ends as a bizarre homage to a certain notorious Z-grade horror epic which must remain unidentified so as not to spoil the joke). The problem is that while the jokes may fly fast and furious from start to finish, only a few of them are actually what students of comedy might refer to as “funny.” Most of them simply lack the kind of crazed invention, screw-loose attitude and, dare I say, intelligence that made things like Airplane!, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun—films that presented very silly jokes in a very smart manner—work. Granted, humor is incredibly subjective and what I think of as dumb might have others rolling on the floor. However, at the public screening that I attended, there were long stretches of time in which I was not the only person in the theater not laughing. (The film gets so desperate for laughs that not only does it outright steal jokes from the Austin Powers movies, it even includes footage from the immortal opening credits of the original Naked Gun during the end credits and that proves to be one of the comedic high points of the whole endeavor.)

Of course, one of the major reasons for the success of the original film was the pitch-perfect performance from Nielsen as Drebin, who recognized that the best way to approach such off-the-wall material was to play it as straight as he did during his days a serious actor and let his deadpan line readings accentuate the silliness of the things that he was asked to say and do in ways that managed to simultaneously evoke both Joe Friday and Jacques Clouseau. (In the later films, he would start leaning into the more overtly comedic aspects and became less interesting as a result.) Here, Neeson certainly tries hard but after a while, it becomes apparent that he just doesn’t have the kind of sly comic timing required to make this kind of performance work. He is trying too hard to spoof the bad-ass image he created for himself in the wake of the surprise success of Taken but watching him going through his goofball paces here, including an extended race to find an open toilet following the consumption of a chili dog to extolling at length about the virtues of the Black Eyed Peas, you can feel the sheer effort that he is putting into trying to come across as wacky and it cannot help but work against the comedy. This is especially obvious in his scenes opposite Anderson, who does possess a natural sense of legitimate comedic timing that she is able to bring to the proceedings, even if the film doesn’t make nearly enough use of it.

As I have said, there are a few funny moments scattered throughout The Naked Gun—with the sheer number of gags trotted out, some of them had to stick—but not nearly enough to put it on the same level as The Naked Gun 33 1/3, let alone the original. Of course, we are now in a period of time when straightforward comedies have inexplicably been all but banished from movie screens to the hinterlands of streaming services. Because of that, audiences starved for humor might find themselves embracing the substandard likes of this film much in the same way that someone who hasn’t eaten a meal in a week might take to a serving of gas station sushi (and perhaps with some of the same aftereffects). However, while those authentic ZAZ productions have clearly managed to stand the test of time by amusing subsequent generations of moviegoers, this one is so insubstantial that you will struggle to recall even the funniest bits afterwards, let alone gleefully quote them in the years and decades to come.