Crew
Director – Akiva Schaffer, Screenplay – Dan Gregory, Doug Mand & Akiva Schaffer, Producers – Erica Huggins & Seth MacFarlane, Photography – Brandon Trost, Music – Lorne Balfe, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ashley Bettini, Visual Effects – Outpost VFX (Supervisor – Robin Lamontagne), PFX, (Supervisor – Javi Menendez Platas) & Rebels (Supervisor – Matthew Mullarkey), Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Production Design – Bill Brzeski. Production Company – Fuzzy Door Productions.
Cast
Liam Neeson (Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr), Pamela Anderson (Beth Davenport), Danny Huston (Richard Cane), Paul Walter Hauser (Ed Hocken Jr.), C.C.H. Pounder (Chief Davis), Kevin Durand (Sig Gustafson), Liza Koshy (Detective Barnes), Eddie Yu (Detective Park), Michael Beasley (Detective Taylor)
Plot
After receiving complaints of excessive force during the stopping of a bank robbery, Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr is reassigned to the Collisions department of Police Squad. He investigates a car crash scene where computer tech Simon Davenport has been killed, which Frank dismisses as a suicide. He is then visited by the dead man’s widow, crime writer Beth Davenport. Frank finds himself being tempted by the alluring Beth and agrees to her pleas to treat Simon’s death as a murder. In investigating Simon’s employer, tech billionaire Richard Cane, the head of Edentech, Frank uncovers Cane’s plot to use a device created by Simon that reverts people to their animal-like nature. Cane is planning to unleash the device on New Year’s Eve and turn the country into chaos while he and his billionaire friends retreat to a bunker paradise.
Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker had great success with the film Airplane! (1980), spoofing the disaster movie fad of the 1970s. Based on that success they went on to create the tv series Police Squad! (1982) starring Leslie Nielsen and spoofing the hard-boiled cop show. This only lasted for six 30-minute episodes, which is a surprise considering the cult popularity the show subsequently gained. Abrahams and the Zuckers went on to spoof the spy movie with Top Secret (1984) and then spun Police Squad! out as a film with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) starring Nielsen and with no less than O.J. Simpson as his partner. This proved a reasonable success and two sequels followed with The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), directed by Zucker on his own, and The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994) from another director, all starring Nielsen and Simpson.
After thirty years, The Naked Gun is a film revival that comes from Akiva Schaffer. Schaffer comes from a background as a writer/director on Saturday Night Live (1975– ). He had previously directed Hot Rod (2007), The Watch (2012), Popstar: Never Stop Popping (2016) and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022), as well as produced Palm Springs (2020). The film is also co-produced by Seth MacFarlane.
I was neither here nor there with the original Naked Gun films. The very visual slapstick form of humour was amusing in Airplane but quickly descended to the inane and scatological through the various copycats of that. The Naked Gun films were certainly popular and Leslie Nielsen found a latter-day stardom, still being cast in these types of films in his mid-eighties and right up until the point of his death in 2010.
With Nielsen no longer with us, the role has been recast with Liam Neeson who is supposed to be Nielsen’s son. While Leslie Nielsen didn’t start as a comedy actor but lucked into it, it is impossible to rewatch any of the original films without seeing them in terms of the live-action cartoon character he became typecast as. Neeson on the other hand comes from a serious acting background. Ever since Taken (2008), Neeson has inhabited a grim, tight-lipped tough guy role and this is essentially him parodying his own typecasting.
Akiva Schaffer imitates the Zucker Brothers style, but doesn’t quite hit the same beats they used to. His comedy has the same deadpan delivery, the same literalistic wordplay and same slapstick gags. But not that many of the sequences seem riotously funny or inspired. Although I suspect that a rewatch of the original films will seem not dissimilar.
The one inspired sequence that Schaffer comes up with is a scene with Kevin Durand spying on Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson with binoculars where their preparing a turkey for the oven and petting the dog manages to seem something incredibly perverse when seen in infra-red silhouette – a sequence that feels borrowed from the similar tent scene in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999). This is followed by a montage sequence where they go away to a chalet where they conduct a magic spell that brings a snowman to life and they then engage in a threeway relationship with the snowman, before it feels rejected and turns vengeful. These sequences have just the right sense of nonsensical delirium you expect of a Naked Gun film.
The film has a surprising degree of genre content that leads to its inclusion here. Aside from the snowman brought to life by a magic spell, there is Danny Huston as a tech bro super-villain planning to use a Mind Control device intended to pacify people to instead revert them to their animal nature and make them attack each other while he and his billionaire friends hide away in a luxury bunker (with Weird Al Yankovich for entertainment!). At one point, we see this harnessed to turn crowds into zombies to attack Liam Neeson. (This is an echo of the plot in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, which featured a device that could control people’s minds). There is also much to do with driverless cars – not really a science-fictional device any longer, even if the ones here are more sophisticated than the current models. The climax features Liam Neeson riding into action while holding onto an owl that contains his father’s spirit as Danny Huston attempts to make an escape with a pair of rocket wristbands.
Trailer here