Son of a (Naked) Gun, Drebin’s Back!

The Naked Gun is cliched, dumb, and derivative. Which is to say that it’s pretty much perfect.

From the moment a bank robber blows a safe box in the first 30 seconds and removes a digital device bearing the inscription P.L.O.T. Device you know you are in the right movie. That feeling is doubly reinforced when an elementary schoolgirl skips past police with guns into a full-on armed bank robbery only to turn into Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson). He, still dressed in elementary schoolgirl skirt, blazer, and tie proceeds to cartoonishly defeat an implausible number of masked thieves.

Despite the gap of 30 years since the last Naked Gun movie, Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island, Hot Rod, and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), has effortlessly stepped into the wisecracking shoes of Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. The Naked Gun follows seamlessly on from the three iconic Naked Gun comedy movies of the early 90s which in turn followed on from the Airplane movies and the short six episode Police Squad season that aired in 1982. Schaffer is helped by the fact that the genre has not aged — there is still a plethora of formulaic police procedurals on screens to parody.

Now in his late 40s, Schaffer seems to have brought out a film aimed at his teenage self (or perhaps his actual teenage kids) but with plenty of references for those in between. Drebin’s attachment to Buffy Season 1 is a thematic call out to those who watched The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear as teenagers but the extended romantic montage that rips the Netflix romcom Hot Frosty is significantly more contemporary.

The Naked Gun ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Akiva Schaffer
Written by: Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, Akiva Schaffer
Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson,
Running time: 85 mins

That absurd mini-movie montage features Drebin and Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) who are a surprisingly believable couple. Anderson has a ball as the knowing, playful femme fatale. She still has the sex appeal for which she’s famous but, rather than being trapped into its two dimensions, uses it as a tool in her comedic toolbox. Both she and her director use it deliberately for plot development and, of course, for laughs.

On a few separate occasions, Drebin and Davenport engage in sexy double entendres. Once, outside his apartment, about turkeys, raw meat, and “stuffing” but then go into the apartment, close the curtains and innocently baste an actual bird. The movie has the joke both ways though, since the villain’s henchman is watching them with infrared tech goggles through the drapes. He draws all the wrong conclusions from their basting and playing with Drebin’s dog!

There are the same daft repeat gags – constant refills of coffee cups, the destruction of phones, biting through pistols. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes they just add to the general mayhem and vibe of spoof. And the vibe is wonderfully silly, and gross with butts and balls and diarrhea. In a detention cell, Drebin reads from a con’s file as he starts to grill him, “You served 20 years for man’s laughter, that must have been one bad joke.” “It was manslaughter.” And then proceeds to show the perp his bodycam as he goes through a day eating chili dogs, hating himself, needing to poop so badly he shoots in the air at a diner to get to the front of the bathroom line.

After 30 years, Weird Al Yankovic is back as himself while everything and nothing has changed. Even beyond the serendipitous assonance of Leslie Nielsen Liam Neeson, the casting works. Drebin Jr. does not have the same utter assurance as Drebin Sr.—indeed, his self doubt makes him a more modern Drebin — but he feels totally at home. Indeed, in a touching moment, Drebin Jr. takes a second to talk to a photo of his dad on the Police Squad wall, “I want to be just like you dad, but also, totally different.” The scene is touching until the camera pans across to Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) talking to a similar photo of his dad and then pulls out to all the police as sons kneeling in front of photos of their dads.

The last third of the film has to wrap up and, though there are a few comedy harvests from seeds planted in the first act, the wisecracking and hilarity fades a little. In keeping with the originals there are a lot of non sequiturs and breaking the fourth wall and almost no actual sex or politics. But in a polarized world where dumb is rarely funny, The Naked Gun provides much needed summer, funny-dumb escape.