The Naked Gun: Liam Neeson – Photo: Paramount Pictures
A veritable buffet of laugh-out-loud sight gags, wordplay, innuendo, and slapstick, The Naked Gun offers up comedy of nearly every flavor, rebooting the cop show-spoofing franchise created by Airplane! masterminds David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker.
The new movie — directed by Akiva Schaffer (Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping), who co-wrote with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand — lands closer to the snappy, joke-a-second feel of Airplane! than the measured deadpan of the 1988 original The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! starring Leslie Nielsen.
That film, if you haven’t seen it lately, moves at a deliberate pace, playing its parody of Dragnet and hard-boiled detective fiction with drop-dead seriousness. Nielsen’s dedicated but dim-witted Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin never winks at the audience despite always orchestrating the joke.
The original’s humor holds up because of its commitment to the bit, not because the movie machine-guns gags nonstop, à la Airplane!, or zanily embraces the absurd like the ZAZ crew’s spy spoof Top Secret!.
Schaffer’s The Naked Gun splits the difference, staying true to Police Squad‘s straight-faced humor, while revving up the joke delivery to a rapid-fire pace. Some of it’s raunchy, some silly, nearly all of it brazenly stupid — “Please, take a chair.” “No, thank you, I have chairs at home.” — and all played with sublime seriousness.
Liam Neeson, starring as Lt. Detective Frank Drebin, Jr., son of Nielsen’s bumbling crime fighter, barely has to deviate from the gruff, crime-fighting ass-kicker persona he’s parlayed into late-career action-movie success.
He just has to play that to the hilt, even while dressed in a schoolgirl uniform, or whatever other ridiculousness the script requires. The actor proves deft at sending up the kind of hard-nosed hero that’s been his bread and butter.
But his tough guy Frank isn’t just trying to solve a murder and a bank heist and foil an evil plot hatched by villainous Elon-esque tech titan Richard Cane (Danny Huston). Romance is on the menu, too, with the murder victim’s lovely sister, Beth Davenport, an author of true crime novels based on fictional stories she makes up herself, portrayed by Pamela Anderson.
Continuing the career renaissance that took off with her Golden Globe- and SAG-nominated turn in The Last Showgirl, Anderson manages the poker-faced comedy decently, not effortlessly.
She dives wholeheartedly into the silliness, though, sending up her bombshell persona by doing things onscreen we never expected to see from her, like scatting jazz, horribly, a sound akin to a chicken making dog noises. It’s hysterical, and endearing.
The movie, for all its steadfast silliness, isn’t afraid of a little sincerity, be it in exploring Frank’s widower grief, or in developing Frank and Beth’s love match. However unlikely their romance, it’s made totally credible by the sweet chemistry between Neeson and Anderson.
Neeson also pairs well with Paul Walter Hauser — primed to be summer’s secret weapon with breakout roles here and in Fantastic Four: First Steps — as Frank’s detective partner Ed Hocken, Jr., son of the George Kennedy character who was police captain to Nielsen’s Frank in the three previous films.
CCH Pounder, always welcome, is Frank and Ed’s cranky boss, Chief Davis. The jokes are so abundant that even the chief gets her own good running gag to go along with the movie’s host of recurring bits, like the running joke of Frank and Ed constantly being handed fresh cups of coffee.
That one eventually gets staler than day-old coffee. The Chief Davis bit, on the other hand, pays off beautifully in the end, partly because it is just so ridiculous. That’s the case with the one-offs and major set-pieces alike — the further the joke goes, the funnier it gets, as in one wild, farcical digression into supernatural horror.
Determined to leave no laughs behind, the filmmakers pack in jokes all the way through the end credits. By volume, far more hit than miss, and, judging by the enthusiastic response at the press screening, the humor should connect with moviegoers starved for the collective relief of big-screen comedy.
The Naked Gun (★★★☆☆) is Rated PG-13 and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
There isn't a great deal of originality in Jamie Wax's new play, Call Me Izzy, but it may well mark the first time a white porcelain toilet has been featured so prominently in a Broadway production.
The 90-minute, one-woman show opens in the bathroom of a mobile home, situated in a trailer park in rural Louisiana, where Isabelle "Izzy" Scutley (Jean Smart, Hacks) spends much of her time, scribbling on sheets of toilet paper with a mascara pen. Poetically, she describes the various shades of blue produced by the disinfectant tablets that she gingerly drops in the tank. To her, they are beautiful. To her husband, Ferd, not so much.
In case you haven't caught up -- or you've given up -- on where we are in the Jurassic World saga, boatloads of dinosaur species were transported from their theme park island to the mainland a couple of sequels ago in Fallen Kingdom.
Now, after a whole sequel, Dominion, to run rampant through cities and towns, and re-acclimate themselves to life on Earth, the dinosaur population in the latest money grab Jurassic World: Rebirth has taken a hit. Acclimating to the changed climate, environments, and co-existence with humans has proved to be more than most dinosaur species can handle.
Based on its stunning trailer -- propelled by early-Hollywood actor Taylor Holmes' ripping 1915 recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem "Boots" -- one might expect 28 Years Later to focus on a father and son's war for survival against zombie-like hordes.
Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, creators of the 2002 series originator 28 Days Later, the film does venture with 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his rugged dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), into territory crawling with rage virus-infected human predators.
Yet, that's just a piece of a richer narrative anchored by the drama of domestic dysfunction within Spike's family, which also includes his homebound, mentally ill mom, Isla (Jodie Comer).
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