Say what you will about Akiva Schaffer’s latest film — and I’m about to say some very nice stuff — but one thing is for sure: “The Naked Gun” is funny. It’s very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very funny. Very.
And it damn well better be. The original “Naked Gun” movies, like “Police Squad!” (the short-lived TV series they spun out of), were high-powered machine guns that used gags for ammo. They took self-serious police dramas and roasted them on a high heat until they got thoroughly burned. That’s the trick with these gag movies. The best ones skewer a genre that typically has no sense of humor of its own. Shows about law and order have been earnest, shameful copaganda for about as long as television has existed. So turning those pompous, condescending shows — not to mention the countless pompous, condescending movies — into an absurd farce is more than just good comedy. It’s a form of justice.
The “Naked Gun” films went away but unlike their predecessor “Airplane!” — a parody of disaster movies that pretty much murdered the disaster genre — cop movies and TV shows never slowed down. They mutated over the years but the genetic slurry is basically the same. In most cop shows and movies, the cops are still the good guys. Even when the cops are bad guys, they only break the law because they think civil rights are bureaucratic obstacles to whatever they decide real “justice” is. And if the cops get too bad, there are always other, better cops to arrest the bad ones. No matter how many cops are corrupt, and no matter how corrupt they are, these stories claim they’re just bad apples. (As if bad apples never spoiled the bunch.)
The point is, the new “Naked Gun” movie works because lampooning cop movies is still fair game. Liam Neeson plays the same type of character he almost always plays, a gruff no-nonsense relic of a bygone era with carte blanche to break laws because when Neeson does it, it’s heroic. Akiva Schaffer’s comedy knows damn well how bonkers and immoral Liam Neeson’s movies can often be. “The Naked Gun” has no respect for that genre. Heck, the only reason “The Naked Gun” respects its own star is because Neeson is willing to make fun of himself — and, by extension, a lot of the movies he’s made over the last 15 years.
The plot is so irrelevant that the opening scene is about villains stealing a machine called the “P.L.O.T. Device.” But suffice it to say there’s a heist, and a seemingly unrelated murder, and Lt. Detective Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson) — the son of Leslie Nielsen’s supercop from the previous movies — is on the case. Frank teams up with the victim’s sister, Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), to investigate the mastermind behind the conspiracy: the evil, evil, evil Elon Musk (Danny Huston). His name has been changed to “Richard Crane,” presumably for legal reasons.
Akiva Schaffer, along with his co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, understands what makes “The Naked Gun” tick. His film masterfully alternates, sometimes from nanosecond to nanosecond, from humorlessness to humor. The jokes wouldn’t work if the tone was entirely goofy, but there still needs to be a million jokes, so “The Naked Gun” constantly resets to conventional cop movie clichés. Schaffer trusts his audience. We know this genre so well we can predict where every line of dialogue, every shot, and every plot point would normally go. So when Schaffer takes a wild turn, which he does several times a minute, it’s almost always hilarious.
None of this would work without Neeson. He’s poked fun at himself before, but never for this long, and never with this long a finger. Like the other Nielsen before him, he refuses to break character no matter how silly the film gets. He’s a hardboiled egg, and he has no idea he’s covered in glitter and someone drew a penis on him. The joke is very much on Neeson, even though we know he willingly signed up for this. If “The Naked Gun” is the culmination of his action movie career — if all the “Takens” and “Non-Stops” and “A Walk Among the Tombstoneses” made it to the finish line, only to collapse in this pile of jokes — the end might have justified the means. Every self-serious Liam Neeson action movie is retroactively funny, because for all intents and purposes he was Frank Drebin Jr. the whole time.
Matching Neeson joke for joke is Pamela Anderson, in the middle of a well-deserved career renaissance after her haunting, award-winning performance in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl.” She already proved she can handle drama. Now she’s reminding us that she is, and always was, a skilled comedian. She throws herself into “The Naked Gun’s” nonsense, confidently performing an extended jazz scat routine that even Jerri Blank would cringe at. The film’s centerpiece — a total digression into a completely different story that spirals into supernatural erotic thriller territory — wouldn’t work if Anderson and Neeson weren’t perfectly attuned to “The Naked Gun’s” wavelength.
It’s tempting to make some trite film critic statement about how this new “Naked Gun” is either superior, inferior or equal to the comedy classics that preceded it. I think that’s irrelevant. What matters is that Akiva Schaffer’s “The Naked Gun” really is “The Naked Gun,” not some halfhearted rehash or itemized nostalgia checklist. It does everything “The Naked Gun” is supposed to do and then some. Oh yes, “The Naked Gun” is back and it’s as naked as ever. And also as gun.