Sadly, No Offence
Surely you don’t mean the capital-S stoopid comedy is back?
The Naked Gun
Director: Akiva Schaffer • Writers: Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, Akiva Schaffer, based on the television series
Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston
USA • 1hr 25mins
Opens Hong Kong July 31 • IIB
Grade: B
I don’t like comedy. Sounds odd, but it’s true. I don’t lack a sense of humour and like most people I enjoy a good laugh but I prefer humour that’s tucked inside drama or horror or science fiction rather than anything labelled “comedy”. I rarely find it particulary funny, and films take so long to make current jokes are meaningless by the time a movie hits screens and localised comedy is too local. That’s not bad, it’s just difficult to translate what works in Cantonese into German and so on. And I don’t find comedy that allegedly transcends language and culture all that amusing. Why is Adam Sandler so huge? Why did The Hangover hit? If you pissed yourself laughing, godspeed. The point is comedy is arguably the most subjective of genres, and it’s also the one that dates fastest.
Which is the long way to get to Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun, a legacy sequel to the original film series starring Leslie Nielsen based on the six-episode Police Squad! TV series from way back in 1982. That came after The Kentucky Fried Movie, David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams’ breakout that led to a bunch of films with exclamation points their titles like Airplane! – still the gold standard for irreverent, incorrect comedy and the masterwork that gave us “Surely you don’t mean this plane is going to crash?”, “That’s exactly what I mean, and don’t call me Shirley.” Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was a brand back in the day that gave us OJ Simpson, movie star, and “Oh stewardess, I speak jive.” Discuss. The show and the ’80s/’90s films, now, are… spicy, and the combined seven hours of material is absolutely loaded with gags that will have some audiences clutching their pearls. But if silly humour is your jam, Family Guy and Ted producer Seth MacFarlane and Schaffer (Saturday Night Live, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) are trying to make the silly-stupid palatable for the 2020s. It’s all very stupid, but amusingly so.
You really have to grok this
They’re starting with 73-year-old comedy titan Liam Neeson (!) as Frank Drebin Jr, son of Nielsen’s superstar idiot detective, heading up the LAPD’s special Police Squad division. We meet him when he thwarts a bank robbery (it’s basically the trailer) and then heads back to the precinct for a party celebrating his 1,000th bust. Of course, the joke is that Drebin cares little for the rule of law or due process – that was funny once, now its biting satire – and sure enough he and his partner Ed Hocken Jr (Paul Walter Hauser, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) get hauled into their boss Captain Davis’s (CCH Pounder) office and reamed for making some kind of PR mess. Next up Drebin and Hocken look into a suicide by motor vehicle that turns out to be a homicide, and Drebin suspects megalomaniacal tech bro Elon Musk Richard Cane (Danny Huston, Wonder Woman, The Crow) has something to do with it. Also getting in on the investigation is the victim’s sister Beth, played with un-selfconscious resurgent career energy by Pamela Anderson. She has a couple of zinger scenes that almost make you forget she chose to be married to Kid Rock at one time. Frank and Beth’s budding romance is accented with zinger scenes like having Frank suggest she, “Take a chair,” in his office, to which she replies, “No thanks, I have plenty at home.” Cane’s spy watches the pair through a backlit window and is treated to a string of deviant sex acts that are actually meal prep. It’s that kind of humour.
The Naked Gun does its best to ride the lines between goofy word play that actually harks back to Police Squad! more than it does the films, sight gags – Drebin and Hocken’s endless supply of coffee cups is on point, as is Frank and Beth’s romantic weekend – and the juvenile digestive tract comedy this kind of film always falls back on. It’s hard to call these strengths, though chances are MacFarlane, Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand are just covering their bases. Put a piece of genuine deadpan wit, a poop joke and stunt that showcases Neeson’s advancing age back-to-back-to-back – Schaffer really does stack them – and one of those is going to wring a chuckle out of someone. In fairness, Anderson goes gleefully all in on a jazz-based distraction that’s admirably unhinged, and Huston does a pretty good straight man. Like Neeson, he’s not world-renowned for his comic timing but his confused deadpan is good value, and his performance is probably more effective than Neeson’s, which waffles between too big and too low key. The big whiff here is not exploiting Kevin Durand as Cane’s henchman Sig, a secret weapon if ever there was one. Durand was gloriously dumb in Abigail and as Vasily the Rat Catcher on The Strain – the only thing anyone remembers from that show – and if anyone in The Naked Gun could have pulled comedy from the franchise’s off-colour roots it’s him. Is this funny? Is it offensive? Has the time for joking about identity politics (except bankers and tech bros) and riffing on Kingsman: The Secret Service passed? Yes to all. But did I guffaw a couple of times? Most definitely.