The new iteration of The Naked Gun is an object lesson in how to resurrect a franchise. It couldn’t possibly be as good as the original three films and it acknowledges that by not attempting to reinvent the wheel. Instead, this is a loving riff on the Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams school of comedy – an experiment in how it might look if the same comic signature was retained but with a different actor at the helm. In that respect Liam Neeson is a good cognate for Leslie Nielson, and not only for the fact that their names are so uncannily similar. Both of them began their career as serious dramatic actors, meaning they’re able to draw on their capacity for pathos and hubris in ways that perfectly suit the off-kilter noir world of Police Squad. Nielsen’s gift was to tap deep into the sentimental and sententious vein of noir while affecting a kind of slapstick oblivion to the world around him – in short, to brilliantly puncture the emergent neo-noir genre that was starting to take over multiplexes in the mid-late 80s. Neeson is a bit more goofy and self-aware than Nielson but his inherently serious voice and mannerisms mean he works in a different way; it’s a bit like his cameo in Ted expanded to an entire film.
Much of the comedy here is therefore familiar. Like Abrahams and the Zuckers before him, Akiva Schaffer leans heavily into slapstick and sight gags, as the characters (especially Neeson’s Frank Drebin, but also Pamela Anderson’s Beth Davenport) oscillate between urbane ennui and inane literalism. They’re continually impeded by taking words at face value in what often feels like a particularly masculine form of humour – manslaughter is confused with man’s laughter – insofar as it punctures the hard-boiled voice that sits behind so much of Hollywood’s male gazes. The physical comedy may not be quite as elaborate in its major set pieces as the original films but there’s still some real ingenuity on display, most notably in a showdown set at a WWE event that is clearly drawing on the spectacular conclusions in the original franchise, such as the baseball game of the first film or the Oscars presentation of the third film.
There are, however, two ways in which this reboot expands upon the original. The first involves one of the most storied signatures of The Naked Gun – the world-weary voiceover that is just a little off-key. Neeson’s Drebin gets stuck into this register right away, with his reflections on Los Angeles: “In this city, usual is unusual, usually.” Likewise, when Drebin arrives at Police Squad headquarters, all of the cops are engaged in their own moody voiceovers, meaning he can no longer hear himself think anymore; his voiceover has become lost in the crowd. Having established the voiceover, then, as an area of further innovation, Schaffer links it to driving in a particularly ingenious way. This connection did take place in the original franchise – after all, the noir voiceover is inextricable from the detective’s automobile trajectories through Los Angeles, and some of the most memorable scenes from the first film involved driving, such as when Drebin enlisted a learner driver to chase down a criminal.
However, the remake leans into this synergy between voiceover and car, and goes on to puncture it, in a new way. Drebin 2.0 gets so immersed in his moody opening monologue that he doesn’t notice when a pedestrian bounces off his windscreen. Later on, his hard-boiled recount of the day’s events is undercut by a carcam that shows him ordering takeout, getting diarrhea, and desperately speeding to a public toilet, where he holds the queue at gunpoint to make it to the facility in time. Another voiceover takes place while he’s asleep in an electric car, as if he is on moody noir autopilot and a second pedestrian falls victim to his windshield while he is immersed in a true crime book. The plot also revolves around cars – the opening crime scene involves a man who drove off a cliff in an electric car and Drebin’s antagonist Richard Cane, played by Danny Huston, is an Elon Musk-like figure who wants to use his Tesla-esque brand as a platform for brainwashing and annihilating most of the globe.
The second ingredient that’s a bit different this time around are the cultural references. The original three films came out during a period of mass media monoculture, meaning that the films could traffic in cultural references that everybody got, culminating with the Oscars ceremony at the end of Final Insult. This was the peak of reference humour and the franchise’s ability to weave in real actors and films became a benchmark for much of the Hollywood comedy of the 90s. By contrast, the reboot comes out during an era of niche media, when we don’t have the same sense of a shared cultural vocabulary, and Schaffer brilliantly taps into this by making all the references fifteen to twenty-five years too old – that is, by dating them to the last time in American culture when this reference humour really resonated. Across the course of the film, Drebin references Chicago, Sex and the City, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl performance and the relative merits of the Black-Eyed Peas and Fergie’s solo career. Most memorably, he lends Beth Davenport his Tevo so she can watch Season 1 of Buffy and “get all his references.” The sheer fact of Anderson’s performance, of a piece with her latter-day reinvention but also parodically leaning into her sultry Baywatch persona, is itself a comically dated reference.
There are also lots of small flourishes that make this a fun watch. The original films often included breakaway musical montages to standards like Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Into Something Good” or Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Now the 80s have become classic and so the montage takes place to Starship’s “Nothing Gonna Stop Us Now,” as Neeson, Anderson and an animated snowman cavort in one of the most surreally comic sequences of the year, up there with the Subway dreamscape of Friendship. The ending is also enjoyably goofy, as Neeson and Anderson retreat to an “Internal Affairs Investigation” – actually a tropical resort, where everyone “freezes” around them in preparation for the end credits, leaving them to wander, bemused, through this awkward tableau. All in all, then, a worthy continuation of the original, even if it could never match its heights, and a welcome reprieve from the post-Marvel snarky-perky brand of comedy that seems to be on the way out for the moment.