The Naked Gun (0/10)

by Tony Medley

85 minutes.

PG-13

I go and it is done, the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan, For it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1

The movie starts with a prologue from star Liam Neeson decrying the dearth of comedies and urging people to support this film. What followed, however, could serve as Macbeth’s knell summoning comedies (at least the Naked Gun comedies) to perdition.

It is described as “a legacy sequel and a soft reboot rather than a full remake.” The first was The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988). Then came The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) followed by The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994), all starring Leslie Nielsen.  This one, however, has Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Nielsen’s original character. That’s a dreadful change. Neeson is no Nielsen.

The first scene is a violent bank robbery. The police are on it but have been advised to stay back and take no action. Cut to a small girl, maybe 10 years old, who walks innocently into the bank. She is accosted by a brutal robber who points a gun at her. Suddenly, like Billy Batson saying “Shazam” and turns into Captain Marvel, the little girl, maybe 4 feet tall if that, wordlessly turns into 6 foot, 4-inch-tall Frank Drebin Jr., an out-of-control cop who subdues the 10+ robbers singlehandedly.

After that the thing just gets worse. Every second was misery. I yearned to leave but if I wanted to write a review, I had to stay. After what seemed like hours, it finally ended and I bolted to my computer to get this down before I went to sleep so I could, with any luck, forget what a rotten, idiotic, unfunny, insulting movie I had just been forced to sit through.

Satire, competently done, even if absurd and silly, can be wonderfully funny, like Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and Young Frankenstein (1974). But when it is not well done, it becomes monotonous dreck.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer, from a script by him and Dan Gregor and Doug Band (I’m amazed that anyone would want to admit to writing this bilge), like the TV series Police Squad! from which all these films germinated, it draws from 1980’s Airplane in the lines it thinks are humor (Police Squad was inspired by Airplane).

But Airplane was funny (“Don’t call me Shirley,” etc.) Each line in this film is clearly trying to emulate those lines, but while the Airport lines were original and actually funny, these Naked Gun lines are obvious and clumsy at best. “Reaching for it” comes swimmingly to mind. Also, the cast of Airplane consisted of people (Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, in addition to Nielsen) who were talented at humor and could play satire effectively. There is nobody in this cast (including Pamela Anderson and Paul Walter Hauser) who remotely approaches the subtle talents of those in Airport. But, then, to give them credit, nobody could do much with this script and story (story? What story?).

The lone person in the cast who gives an effective performance is Danny Huston, who plays Richard Cane, the bad guy. But he plays it straight. The only life in the film is when he is onscreen.

This is the first time in a long time that I’ve been in a film where I was almost certain that the audience was enhanced by multiple laugh shills. One of the apparent shills was sitting very close to me. She deserved a Shill Oscar, almost rolling in the aisle laughing uproariously. The key is when, at the beginning, people are laughing loudly at things that were not the least bit humorous, and this film is awash with those things.