When Liam Neeson agreed to star in The Naked Gun, he knew he had big shoes to fill.  If you’ve seen the previous movies in this franchise, you probably heard those words in the voice of leading man Leslie Nielson, a dramatic actor who quickly mastered the art of the deadpan delivery.  You may also have envisioned the 6’ 4” Neeson stumbling around in a pair of noisy clown shoes.  That’s the challenge with following up one of the greatest comedies ever made, filling those iconic shoes.  While Neeson is up to the challenge and the movie is funny, it’s not in the same league of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films from the Eighties and early Nineties.

Like the previous Naked Gun films, this one is a comedy smorgasbord of sight gags, slapstick, puns, double-entendres, cop movie parodies, wry cultural references and so on.  It begins with the self-proclaimed “new version” of Frank Drebin (Liam Neeson) facing off against heavily armed bank robbers.  He approaches them dressed up as a little school girl with a lollipop, to which the robbers think, WTF?  Drebin tears off his mask to reveal that he’s actually a (substantially taller) grown man who can wield that lollipop like a Ninja.  How did Drebin manage to shrink himself down to Tom Cruise size?  I have no idea, but it’s a funny sight gag.

Drebin disarms the robbers single-handedly, first by taking their guns away and removing the cartridge, then by biting them in half.  (The movie does well whenever it plays into Neeson’s violent action movie hero persona.)  He then does an elaborate handshake routine with one of the robbers, and at the end he pantomimes shooting the guy.  Eh.

Unbeknownst to Drebin and the rest of the police, the bank heist was a diversion.  During the hostage situation out front, a blond-haired, black turtlenecked baddie breaks into a safety deposit box and steals an electronic device helpfully labeled “Plot Device”.  Like the mask, this movie has numerous references to the Mission: Impossible films, which made me question why the filmmakers didn’t spoof that franchise instead.

At Police Squad headquarters, Drebin meets up with his partner Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser, playing the son of George Kennedy).  They share a tearful moment paying tribute to their now-deceased policeman fathers at the station’s Hall of Legends, where a big joke comes at the expense of OJ Simpson, who starred in the previous three films.  I honestly wished that joke wasn’t in the trailer, because it’s one of the few jokes that sting in the movie.  Police Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) is furious over Drebin’s antics and places him on collisions detail.

Before Drebin drives to his first collision scene, Drebin’s voice-over narration parodies how the movies usually depict a cop’s life.  He lives in a cop apartment, stares at the picture of his dead cop wife and cries cop tears.  Brilliant.  The crash scene concludes with a funny sight gag involving a crane, and thinking back mentally the movie’s sight gags hit most often.

Back at headquarters, Drebin meets Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), sister of the crash site victim.  Like a classic film noir femme fatale, she’s blonde, busty and beautiful.  Drebin’s voice-over describes her so crassly, however, that it’s impossible not to laugh.  Turns out Beth’s brother was investigating tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston), and suspects he was killed for uncovering something nefarious.

In search of video footage of Beth’s dead brother, Drebin heads to Cane’s exclusive club and finds Beth there as well.  (She’s a true crime novelist, a detail that amounts to nothing.)  If you remember the original Naked Gun, you remember its bar scene.  This movie’s version is okay, with a sight gag involving the bartender, a stuffed beaver, the “made-up name inspired by what’s within eyesight” joke, and so on.  Drebin and Cane have a terse, macho exchange which devolves into their mutual love of a dance band from the Nineties, which is funnier than it sounds.  At one point, Beth distracts Cane in the oddest way possible, which is funny at first but goes on way too long.

Drebin’s antics force Davis to suspend him, which leads to a montage inspired by the first film’s “Something Tells Me I’m Onto Something Good” montage.  This time around, we get scenes of Drebin and Beth falling in love set to one of the flimsiest pop songs from the Eighties.  A snowman becomes involved, and the outcome is surreal.  Later, the aforementioned blond guy spies on Drebin and Beth with infrared glasses, and what he sees is the funniest part of the movie.  Eventually, the clues lead Drebin to a MMA fight on New Year’s Eve, where Cane will unleash his fiendish plot upon the world.  Where Drebin goes, chaos is sure to follow, along with a smattering of jokes.  The highlight is an out-of-left-field actor cameo that I won’t spoil here.  Be sure to stay until after the closing credits for a very special cameo by a famous musician who happens to play the accordion.

Recommendation

For comedies like The Naked Gun, it’s about percentages.  Stuff the movie with a ton of gags and hope that a majority of them land.  I’d say 55-60% of the material made me laugh.  That said, some of the wordplay is more clever than funny.  Several detours into weirdness felt misplaced.  In some cases, routines go on for far too long and the film idles, waiting for a joke to rescue it.  Some gags looked ready to grow into something bigger, but usually didn’t.  Although the comedy is uneven, the movie made me laugh more often than not, which that counts as a win.

Liam Neeson’s gruff seriousness is used to good effect, although not consistently.  The movie should have leaned into his angry, violent movie persona more often.  Neeson’s performance works best when he’s the focal point of the slapstick, where his action movie talents pay off.  Neeson is sorely out of his depth whenever the movie asks him to act clueless or oblivious, however.  He just can’t hit those notes like his cinematic father, Leslie Nielson.  Neeson is up for anything, though, no matter how humiliating, and sells the jokes with every fiber of his being.  This being his first go-around in broad comedy, I expect him to be better next time around.

Pamela Anderson is a well-known celebrity, which is the only reason why she was cast in this.  Unfortunately, her attempts at comedy never really clicks.  Pricilla Presley was funny because her performance was the opposite of our public perception of her.  Anderson, however, has never been taken seriously as an actor, and her personal life has been fodder for tabloids for decades.  Her longtime cultural ubiquity eliminates the element of surprise, and reduces her performance to her physical presence and so-so line readings.

Writer-director Akiva Schaffer succeeds in channeling the spirit of the prior Naked Gun films.  He keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, which is critical for movies like this.  Schaffer splits time between the movie’s Naked Gun atmosphere and the Mission: Impossible inspired subplot, with the two sometimes working at cross-purposes to each other.  Schaffer wraps everything up with a big climactic ending that kinda works despite being unnecessarily busy.  Schaffer excels with sight gags, with the dialog-driven jokes delivered by Neeson and Danny Huston a distant second.  (Leslie Nielson’s ability to portray a pompous blowhard is sorely missed here.)  Schaffer does strike gold whenever he satirizes the cop movie genre, and I wished the movie had focused on that aspect more.

The Naked Gun is funny stuff, but not at the level of the classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films that inspired it.  Even still, the jokes that work are exceptional and Liam Neeson’s late-career pivot into playing the class clown was a smart one.  Recommended.

Analysis

Spoiler alert!  I’ll be discussing specific jokes below!  You’ve been warned!

The first order of business for any filmmaker following in the footsteps of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (or Mel Brooks) is that their movie has to have a high quantity of jokes.  Any moment when the audience is fidgeting while waiting for the next gag is comedic death.  The jokes have to come in rapid succession, because not all of them will land.  If one is a dud, the next one might, and you want the audience to have little or no time to think about the dud in the rear view mirror.

The issue I had with The Naked Gun is that it needed more jokes that were laugh out loud funny.  Thankfully, there are enough for the movie to get by, but the number of clunkers is noticeable.  Comparing this movie to The Naked Gun from 1998 may be unfair, but when you stand on the shoulders of giants, you need to accept that you’re going to be held to a higher standard than if your movie was called “Rogue Cop Movie”.

Although The Naked Gun works hard at making us laugh, the endeavor rarely achieves the level of lunacy the franchise was known for.  The culprit is the material, which is very uneven.  Some of the jokes are perfect, the funniest I’ve seen in a movie in a long time.  But the jokes that don’t work are either underdeveloped, go on too long or lack bite.  For a script that was in development for years, it feels like more time was needed to polish what’s there.

Of the top of my head, the movie’s best jokes include:

• The “plot device”.  Great parody of the Mission: Impossible films.
• The Hall of Fame at Police Squad.  The dig at OJ is nasty.
• Frank Drebin’s voice-over narration describing his pitiful cop life.  Great genre satire.
• Richard Cane telling Beth that the wine she’s drinking came from Bill Cosby’s private collection definitely drew blood.
• Drebin misreads manslaughter as “man’s laughter”.  One of the few verbal puns that worked.
• Drebin takes the EV for a test drive, and it pulls out all of the EV charging stations.  Great sight gag that builds by showing the prisoners escaping, including Hannibal Lecter.
• Having Drebin asleep in his self-driving EV car, and the car telling him to take the wheel.  Nice jab at the purported intelligence of EVs.
• When the crane that’s supposed to get the crashed vehicle turns out to be an arcade crane.  Great sight gag.
• The infrared turkey cooking scene.  Best sequence of sight gags in the entire movie.  One of the few times the movie goes for outright filthy jokes.
• Showing Spirit Halloween moving into the shuttered Police Squad building.  Excellent timing with the holiday right around the corner.
• Having the body camera capture Drebin’s coney dog and black coffee misadventures.  Having Busta Rhymes say out loud “don’t do it” when Drebin is about another coney dog was hilarious.
• Having Clippy appear in the EV’s navigation screen.  Inspired.
• The “did you get all that” scene, where each set reveals another set.  A sight gag that progressively builds successfully.
• Having David Bautista fill in for Leslie Nielson while the latter is in the john.  Caught me entirely by surprise.
• ponzischeme.com arena.  Loved this.  I also loved it later when an extra tripped on the on-screen location title outside the arena.
• Stating that Weird Al Yankovic playing in the Doomsday Giggle Ballroom, and showing him in the end, were both perfect.

Comedy is not pretty.

The “take a seat” gag, bookended by Beth changing her mind and actually taking a seat when she leaves, was a groaner.  The bit is in the mode of the ZAZ puns of yesteryear, but the joke is weak and Anderson can’t sell it.

The same thing happens with the daft “UCLA?”  “I see LA every day” repartee between Drebin and Beth.  On paper, it’s a funny play on words.  But Neeson and Anderson can’t exude cluelessness like Nielson and Presley.

There’s a running gag about cops always having a cup of coffee in their hands.  It begins promisingly, when a hand reaches into Drebin’s car from out of nowhere to give him a cup while he’s driving.  Subsequent attempts to build on this don’t work because they’re not as funny as the first one.  When they’re handed another cup of coffee, they throw the one they have away.  Then we see a table filled with discarded coffee cups.  The joke fizzles and is abandoned.  They needed to up the ante, with cups arriving via drone, being secretly placed on Drebin’s nightstand by Ninjas, that sort of thing.  Or least keep the joke going until the end.

Having Drebin and Crane go back and forth about their love for the Black Eyed Peas.  The joke is that two tough guys are talking so seriously about one of the most lightweight bands from the 2000s.  After a couple of go-arounds, the joke peeters out.  Something needed to push this one over the edge.  For example, In Airplane!, there’s the Ethal Merman joke, which involves the real Ethal Merman.  Fergie needed to show up in a cameo here, or maybe Will.I.Am.  Shoot, why not have the entire band appear in Cane’s club on stage.  The movie is too content with jokes like this one just being mildly funny instead of taking them as far as they can go.

The scene when Cane tells his fellow billionaires what his plan is, and one guy who keeps describing different kinds of deformed people, first with gills, then lobster hands.  It needed to be whittled down to just the first joke.  The scene tries for a Lloyd Bridges level of inanity, but it doesn’t get there.

The movie has Neeson make a stab at the “make up a name using things within eyesight” gag, and it falls flat, primarily because the fake name isn’t that funny.  See the same gag in Nielson’s Wrongfully Accused for how it’s done.

When Drebin is tip-toeing in Cane’s basement lair, squeaky noises force him to stop dead in his tracks twice.  Both are funny, but then he falls down a flight of stairs.  Why not prolong the “don’t make a sound” routine by having Drebin step on a cat, a whoopie cushion, a rat trap, etc?  The setup is there, but the filmmakers don’t take the next logical step by letting it build to progressively bigger laughs.

The scene where Beth scats while Drebin is looking for video footage is interminable, a joke that quickly wears out its welcome.  It needed to get sillier, perhaps with Beth playing the band member’s instruments.  Or have Beth sing in different styles.

The montage of Drebin and Beth falling in love was too weird to be funny.  It plays like another gag that reads better than it looks on screen.  Maybe it’s because I’ve already seen the horror movie Jack Frost (1997), which is about a serial killer who possesses a snowman.  The gag needed something to make it work, like taking a swipe at Michael Keaton’s Jack Frost (1998) by having him make a cameo.

The scene where Drebin badgers the blonde bad guy to a confession goes on too long, for too little payoff.  “Do you want to be known as farty?”  Eh.  Neeson can’t sell this dialog at all.  It needed Nielson.

I like how Drebin and Cane’s fistfight ended after the former landed one punch.  But the scene needed to end after Cane after Drebin says “You’ve never been in a fight before, have you?”  Instead, it drags on.

The David Bautista cameo worked very well, but then the movie extends it unnecessarily.  Why show the crazy people attacking him?  It’s a case of the filmmakers getting greedy and taking the cameo beyond its logical ending point.  A cameo in a movie like this should be a quick jab, not a succession of punches.

The joke about the owl being Frank Drebin Jr. fell flat.  I guess the filmmakers felt compelled to have the original Drebin make an appearance in some way, but it was weak.

The notion of everyone fighting felt ripped off from This is The End.  The device should have forced everyone to sing “I’ve got a feeling” over and over until they collapsed.

The closing scene where Drebin and Beth find themselves in a freeze frame was weird and could have worked, but there’s no payoff to it.  I don’t understand why Drebin punches the screen at the end.