The Naked Gun.

One problem the new Naked Gun film, now streaming on Paramount+ and rentable on iTunes/Amazon, has is that it’s not funny enough. The bigger problem it has, however, is that it’s not funny often enough. This movie shoots more blanks than me since my vasectomy.

The hallmark of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker oeuvre, which includes AirplaneI, the Police Squad TV series (still the funniest show in the history of the medium), and the original three Naked Gun movies, was rapid-fire jokes that gave you little chance to catch your breath. That trio of writers had an endless capacity for humor, especially wordplay and sight gags, but they also understood that for jokes like theirs, it’s best to just keep them coming, so if one doesn’t land, there’s a better one right around the corner. Police Squad was the most joke-dense of their work, but most of their movies threw out jokes like automatic fire, so no one remembers the dull parts or jokes that weren’t as funny. You left all of those movies marveling about the jokes that did land.

So unfortunately the new Naked Gun film doesn’t follow that style at all, and is weirdly concerned with something the ZAZ crew rarely bothered with at all – plot. The film opens with a bank robbery where a very villainish-looking guy comes and retrieves a piece of electronics helpfully labelled as a “P.L.O.T. Device,” which I took as a wonderful sign that we were in for some silliness. Instead, there’s an actual plot, as Richard Cane (Danny Huston, unconvincing as an evil billionaire because he’s utterly charmless) wants to use this device to send out a frequency that will allow him to (the Brain voice) take over the world. It’s at least 50% more plot than the movie would need if there were more gags, and it seems like the writers made a deliberate choice to replace humor with plot, to the movie’s great detriment because the plot isn’t interesting or all that necessary.

Liam Neeson steps into some giant shoes – there’s a sight gag they could have used – as Frank Drebin, Jr., although he doesn’t have the same deadpan style or oblivious look that Leslie Nielsen brought to the Drebin role. (I still marvel at maybe the best joke from the TV show: “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Drebin: “I’m a locksmith [pause] … and I’m a locksmith.” There is nothing as funny as that scene in this entire movie.) Drebin thwarts the bank robbery with a surprising display of combat skills and agility, although some of it is really quite funny, but of course it lands him and his partner Ed (an underutilized Paul Walter Hauser) in hot water with their boss (CCH Pounder, who gets one great scene). Frank is off the case, and gets reassigned to a car crash that might be a suicide, except it’s actually connected to the bank robbery and to Richard Cane and brings Frank into the orbit of femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, the best part of the movie). She wants revenge, Frank wants Beth, and along the way they’ll both get what they want, along with a little hanky-panky with a snowman.

I was as primed to like this movie as anybody; I knew going in that it wouldn’t be the same as the original films or TV show, because it’s not the same writers, but I expected this film to mimic the original’s style a lot more than it does. Instead it tries to bridge the chasm between a conventional crime story and a ridiculous ZAZ comedy, and that just doesn’t work. There are many funny bits in the film – the windshield, the bedroom scene with Ronald, the name of the arena for the climactic scene – but they’re sparse. When Drebin asks Beth to take a chair, and she says that she has plenty of chairs at home, it’s such a callback to the original – and so rare in this movie – that it just left me with nostalgia for the first movie. You’ve got to follow that up with another gag, and another, and another. This film lets that joke hang, and revisits it at the end of the scene, without filling in the gaps with more one-liners, puns, and visual gags.

The ZAZ film Top Secret! had a bestiality joke that’s one of its funniest gags (and one I still can’t believe didn’t get the film an R rating), but it’s very quick and the scene quickly moves to the next joke. Compare that to the new Naked Gun’s bestiality joke, which is an eye-roller when it’s first on screen, and then it goes on … and on … and on. The writers failed to understand what made the ZAZ films and Police Squad tick: They would deliver a joke, and whether or not it worked, they’d just keep rolling to the next one. Instead we get the Krusty in the Big Ear Family treatment, even when a bit starts out promising (the Tivo gag).

Neeson doesn’t have Leslie Nielsen’s impeccable timing, which particularly shows up when his character delivers one of his nonsensical lines. When Drebin asks Cane to see some security footage, Cane asks “Oh. May I ask why?” and Drebin says, “Go right ahead.” The joke is great. The movie then screeches to a halt while Danny Huston screws up his face in confusion, as if they’re waiting for audience to laugh rather than just moving on to the next gag. The joy of the originals was that you often couldn’t catch your breath from one bout of laughter before the next, and you’d have to rewatch to see the jokes you missed from laughing the first time.

There are good jokes in The Naked Gun, from the snowman sequence to the Drebin’s conversation with a bartender to the football joke about Drebin’s late wife (where he was most reminiscent of Nielsen’s portrayal). There are a handful of great one-liners. There’s a very good running gag about coffee cups, something that the originals did well, going back to the same joke enough that a mediocre joke would become funny. There are even some pretty bold attempts at jokes that don’t work – the Bill Cosby one was probably too much – where you can at least respect the effort. They’re just dwarfed by fart jokes, shit jokes, a lengthy description of Drebin’s penis, and lots of lowbrow bits that don’t pay off. Fart jokes are the laziest type of comic writing there is, and in a movie that doesn’t even run to 90 minutes, it feels like padding the essay to get to the teacher’s word count.

It’s possible I am just too biased in favor of the originals and was hoping for something more similar to them in pace and style, but I’ve seen multiple reviews of this film that claim it’s a lot closer to the first Naked Gun film than it actually is. If ZAZ hadn’t set such a high standard, perhaps the new Naked Gun would seem stronger.