In its original iteration, the Zucker brothers’ Naked Gun wasn’t just carried by Leslie Nielsen’s performance––nearly every aspect of the first two David Zucker-directed films was a reflection of it. As buffoonish detective lieutenant Frank Drebin, Nielsen’s scenery-chewing baritone encapsulated the square-jawed, hypermasculine self-seriousness of a generation of patriotic popular entertainment unleashed on America during the Reagan years, themselves often self-conscious mimics of the leading men and man-of-action morality plays of the midcentury Hollywood pulp on which Nielsen cut his teeth. Drebin’s guileless stupidity as he bumbles through formula-perfect cop thriller plots playing the maverick hero, and Nielsen’s readiness to bug his eyes out or call a man “Mr. Poopy Pants” in the middle of an otherwise dead-serious delivery, gleefully deflated the macho put-on, luxuriating in pushing the already juvenile nature of the popular fantasies just a few key steps over the edge from self-parody to parody. Accordingly, the films themselves are shot and scored like the mountains of formulaic schlock they’re spoofing, with laughs arising from the narrative tropes and cinematic language of post-Dirty Harry copaganda pushed just beyond the genre’s usual overcooked realism into mountains of visual gags and surreal, childish play-logic (say, a chalk outline of a corpse floating on water at the scene of a maritime murder).
America’s popular action and crime media of the Reagan and Bush Sr. eras was, crucially, so formulaic, so overcrowded with me-too lookalikes and so laughable in its adolescent power fantasies’ detachment from reality that much of it practically makes fun of itself already. It’s hard to argue that the cultural era which gave the world Arnold Schwarzenegger was completely devoid of self-awareness, but the popular style was to enact these fantasies of sneering, violent macho professionalism with enough boyish sincerity to endear an audience whether they took it seriously or not. It was in this space between appreciation and mockery of gun-toting American kitsch that The Naked Gun found its niche.
Zucker and Nielsen’s final Naked Gun movie, however (The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult) was released in 1994, and the mood of American kitsch has changed considerably in the three decades since. The pieties of Reagan’s “moral majority,” so comforting if one were to believe them and so easily lampooned in their fairytale simplicity, have been succeeded in the popular ethos by a dark world of nihilism, uncertainty, betrayal, and rage. Between the news, the Internet, and ever-more-immersive forms of virtual escape, Americans have become increasingly desensitized to violent and pornographic images and acclimated to the dehumanization such sights bring about in regular exposure; we need ever more extreme and innovative system shocks to feel anything, a camera in constant motion, framerates speeding and slowing to simulate adrenaline. At the same time, a democratization of voices and images has made systemic violence harder to conceal, with fewer Americans able to comfortably shelter themselves from the violence of our state or pretend the wielders of state violence only do so responsibly. Post-Naked Gun action cinema has incorporated all of these trends––the dystopian gloom and rage of our politics, the jittery overstimulation of video games, phone video and app feeds, the blurring of moral lines across fantasies of righteous violence and righteous protectors––even as Hollywood insistently looks backwards for its next big break.
It’s nothing if not fitting that Akiva Schaffer’s reboot (excuse me, legacy sequel) of The Naked Gun should pick Liam Neeson to fill in the late Mr. Nielsen’s clown shoes––not just because the two men have similar-sounding names. Since kicking off his late-period career renaissance with 2008’s Taken, Neeson has become an emblematic star of the newer, meaner 21st-century male violence spectacle: not cool, suave, and braggadocious like Sean Connery, but sweaty, searing, and implacable like Daniel Craig; not a cracker of one-liners but growling, grimacing, tortured, an instrument of pure flesh-rending will who fights (and fights, and fights) not for country or creed but to avenge his loved ones, or simply to prove he exists. The question Schaffer and Neeson have to answer is: is that guy funny?
Comedy is the most subjective art, of course. But in Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand’s attempt to construct a funhouse of gags akin to the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker originals––incorporating the jagged edges and ever-darkening shadows of popular entertainment and reality in the current century––the answer to the above question is a resounding: kind of! As Frank Drebin, Jr., Neeson growls and grits his teeth through every silly line as best he knows how: compared to his daddy, this Drebin is angry, a trigger-happy widower with a grudge against crime and the moral degeneration of America, one for whom the cultural clock appears to have stopped some time during the second Bush administration––at least judging by his obsessions over TiVo, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Janet Jackson Super Bowl scandal, references which give you a keen sense of the film’s target demographic.
When femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson)––a writer of “true crime novels based on fictional stories she made up”––enlists his help in investigating her brother’s suspicious suicide, Drebin meets a kindred spirit-of-sorts in Richard Crane (Danny Huston, ever greasy but a bit old and square for the real-life guys he’s referencing), a sinister tech oligarch obsessed with sperm supplements, mixed martial arts, and accelerationist doomsday schemes meant to restore the masculine virility of a society that won’t cancel you for saying “retarded.” When he’s not wreaking havoc, Drebin is reined in by Police Squad colleagues like his chief (CCH Pounder), a strong Black woman who reminds him that cops in today’s America need to play by the rules and take accountability for their use of force.
True enough to the Zucker empire, Schaffer’s film doesn’t exactly concern itself with “plot” so much as the opportunity to bombard the audience with gags and spoofs; if you’re hoping for an incisive satire of the reactionary core of American policing or the tenuous odd-couple alliance between working-class Trump voters and billionaire technofascists, or even some parodic-earnest character-writing akin to Nielsen’s goofball romance with Priscilla Presley across the original Gun trilogy, please look elsewhere. And many of the gags, to be sure, are good, including some shameless wordplay (“You can’t fight city hall!” “No. It’s a building.”) and fourth-wall breaks in the Zucker mold; the best of these (for instance, Neeson in full deadpan reading out a suspect’s charge for “man’s laughter,” or a disembodied arm serving him coffee through the window of a moving vehicle) can be found in the film’s trailers.
But if the film has a true kindred spirit in the Nielsen originals, it’s a little more Naked Gun 33⅓ than Naked Gun 2½. The film that petered out the original Gun run was decidedly looser than even its anarchic predecessors: where the two David Zucker-directed entries were as studious as their star in hitting every cop-pulp affectation square on the nose––so as better to escalate into lunacy––the Peter Segal-directed trilogy-capper was less-focused, wobbling between disparate movie spoofs and gross-out gags when its mock-narrative thread lacked organic momentum. Likewise, the Schaffer reboot contains several spoofs and homages of varying degrees of quality to showcase where cinematic crime pulp has gone in three decades: it opens on a bank heist reminiscent of Heat by way of The Dark Knight, with the middle-aged superhero dressed as a schoolgirl instead of a bat, nods through a balletic John Wick-esque fight scene whose main gag is Drebin hitting guys in the balls, sneaks in a brief goof on Oldboy, and peaks its parodic vocabulary with a multilayered riff on Mission: Impossible — Fallout’s prized riff on the Brian De Palma original.
When it’s not courting nostalgia, it attempts a variety of extended off-color gags on such topics as diarrhea, bestiality, dismemberment, PG-13 male nudity, and (old faithful) penile trauma. Sometimes (truer in spirit to Schaffer’s prior work than the Zuckers) it just goes for complete non-sequiturs, like a sequence involving a snowman come to life that’s slightly less funny than a similar bit in 2011’s A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.
What will ultimately sell the film or not to any audience member is how much they like what Neeson is doing here. Nielsen’s authoritative swagger in the Zucker saga made the regular spectacle of his deflation instantly, intuitively funny. Neeson––playing the snarling, angry, unhinged self-parody of his post-Taken action roles for which he’s best known to a generation––is not at all trying to be a carbon copy, but he gets many Nielsen-esque deflationary moments (dorky wordplay, inarticulate verbiage, farcical misunderstandings, etc.). It isn’t clear to me, though, that watching an angry crazy guy say silly things is funny in the same visceral way as watching a composed, confident guy say silly things. This is also, incidentally, why mocking conservative political figures is not as funny today as it was twenty or thirty years ago. Even the film’s visual register––a dark, ugly washed-out digital canvas that appropriately mimics the palette of a contemporary B-movie or streaming-service original in which you might expect to see Liam Neeson––is dispiriting in a way that doesn’t quite lend itself to Zucker-style zaniness, even as Schaffer puts due diligence into cramming gags into backgrounds, foleys, and wherever else they can fit, whether they’re first-rate material or not.
The surprise heart of the film, in this respect, is Pamela Anderson, who takes effortlessly to the kind of broad, marker-drawn, boiled-too-hard noir caricature that would’ve slotted right alongside Canada’s late king of deadpan, and effortfully to the kind of boisterous clowning and physical comedy erupting out of this po-faced caricature that would do the Zuckers proud. (Her best scene involves an increasingly energetic, and inelegant, scat-singing nightclub performance––crucial cover for Drebin’s high-stakes infiltration of the villain’s lair, naturally.) Next to the grit and self-reflexiveness of today’s action-thriller vocabulary, she feels appropriately (and endearingly) like a relic of a different era; the rest of the film is stuck in-between.
The Naked Gun is now in theaters.