{"id":10965,"date":"2025-10-01T10:50:31","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T14:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10965"},"modified":"2025-10-01T10:50:31","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T14:50:31","slug":"the-naked-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/01\/the-naked-gun\/","title":{"rendered":"The Naked Gun."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One problem the new Naked Gun<\/em> film, now streaming on Paramount+ and rentable on iTunes<\/a>\/Amazon<\/a>, has is that it\u2019s not funny enough. The bigger problem it has, however, is that it\u2019s not funny often enough. This movie shoots more blanks than me since my vasectomy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hallmark of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker oeuvre, which includes AirplaneI<\/a><\/em>, the Police Squad<\/a><\/em> TV series (still the funniest show in the history of the medium), and the original three Naked Gun<\/a><\/em> 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\u2019s best to just keep them coming, so if one doesn\u2019t land, there\u2019s a better one right around the corner. Police Squad<\/em> 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\u2019t as funny. You left all of those movies marveling about the jokes that did land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So unfortunately the new Naked Gun<\/em> film doesn\u2019t follow that style at all, and is weirdly concerned with something the ZAZ crew rarely bothered with at all \u2013 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 \u201cP.L.O.T. Device,\u201d which I took as a wonderful sign that we were in for some silliness. Instead, there\u2019s an actual plot, as Richard Cane (Danny Huston, unconvincing as an evil billionaire because he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s great detriment because the plot isn\u2019t interesting or all that necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liam Neeson steps into some giant shoes \u2013 there\u2019s a sight gag they could have used \u2013 as Frank Drebin, Jr., although he doesn\u2019t 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: \u201cWho are you, and how did you get in here?\u201d Drebin: \u201cI\u2019m a locksmith [pause] \u2026 and I\u2019m a locksmith.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll both get what they want, along with a little hanky-panky with a snowman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was as primed to like this movie as anybody; I knew going in that it wouldn\u2019t be the same as the original films or TV show, because it\u2019s not the same writers, but I expected this film to mimic the original\u2019s 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\u2019t work. There are many funny bits in the film \u2013 the windshield, the bedroom scene with Ronald, the name of the arena for the climactic scene \u2013 but they\u2019re sparse. When Drebin asks Beth to take a chair, and she says that she has plenty of chairs at home, it\u2019s such a callback to the original \u2013 and so rare in this movie \u2013 that it just left me with nostalgia for the first movie. You\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ZAZ film Top Secret!<\/em> had a bestiality joke that\u2019s one of its funniest gags (and one I still can\u2019t believe didn\u2019t get the film an R rating), but it\u2019s very quick and the scene quickly moves to the next joke. Compare that to the new Naked Gun<\/em>\u2019s bestiality joke, which is an eye-roller when it\u2019s first on screen, and then it goes on \u2026 and on \u2026 and on. The writers failed to understand what made the ZAZ films and Police Squad<\/em> tick: They would deliver a joke, and whether or not it worked, they\u2019d just keep rolling to the next one. Instead we get the Krusty in the Big Ear Family treatment<\/a>, even when a bit starts out promising (the Tivo gag).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neeson doesn\u2019t have Leslie Nielsen\u2019s 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 \u201cOh. May I ask why?\u201d and Drebin says, \u201cGo right ahead.\u201d The joke is great. The movie then screeches to a halt while Danny Huston screws up his face in confusion, as if they\u2019re waiting for audience to laugh rather than just moving on to the next gag. The joy of the originals was that you often couldn\u2019t catch your breath from one bout of laughter before the next, and you\u2019d have to rewatch to see the jokes you missed from laughing the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are good jokes in The Naked Gun<\/em>, from the snowman sequence to the Drebin\u2019s conversation with a bartender to the football joke about Drebin\u2019s late wife (where he was most reminiscent of Nielsen\u2019s portrayal). There are a handful of great one-liners. There\u2019s 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\u2019t work \u2013 the Bill Cosby one was probably too much \u2013 where you can at least respect the effort. They\u2019re just dwarfed by fart jokes, shit jokes, a lengthy description of Drebin\u2019s penis, and lots of lowbrow bits that don\u2019t pay off. Fart jokes are the laziest type of comic writing there is, and in a movie that doesn\u2019t even run to 90 minutes, it feels like padding the essay to get to the teacher\u2019s word count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019ve seen multiple reviews of this film that claim it\u2019s a lot closer to the first Naked Gun <\/em>film than it actually is. If ZAZ hadn\u2019t set such a high standard, perhaps the new Naked Gun<\/em> would seem stronger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One problem the new Naked Gun film, now streaming on Paramount+ and rentable on iTunes\/Amazon, has is that it\u2019s not funny enough. The bigger problem it has, however, is that it\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1474,599,102,215],"class_list":["post-10965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2025-movies","tag-comedies","tag-disappointments","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10966,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10965\/revisions\/10966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}