Asked “When’s the last time you saw a funny movie?” I go back to 2020 and James Sweeney’s Straight Up (which featured a classic Obama riposte among other knee-slappers). But the new remake of The Naked Gun, though determinedly silly, doesn’t offer humorous witticism. Its laffs reek of desperation, which actually makes it part of the “death of comedy” dilemma that has dried up most movies and ruined late-night TV.
Reviewers praise the remake for attempting to repeat the matchless spoof series that began in 1988 with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, by the ZAZ trio (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker). That original spoof of TV police shows and buddy-cop movies starred Leslie Nielsen as Los Angeles police inspector Frank Drebin. Doofus Drebin derived from Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther as much as it did from Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Millennials are not likely to remember the source of that franchise or its Scary Movie offshoot by the Wayans Brothers. But casting Liam Neeson as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. in this modernization conveys a different set of values.
Having gone from the valiant Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List to the existentially impelled vigilante of the Taken series, Neeson coarsens his own careerism. His frustrated frowns seem angry, cold-eyed, and aloof — not jokey like Nielsen’s try-anything emotional acrobatics, which reached back to the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet and the cheesy Hollywood swank of Harlow.
After being cruelly dispatched in his late career as the sacrificial villain of Barbra Streisand’s narcissistic feminist revenge drama Nuts, Nielsen’s only recourse was a switch to ZAZ buffoonery, winking at his own history of Hollywood reinvention. (He had previously appeared in ZAZ’s Airplane! alongside generational peers Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and George Kennedy — a lineup Pauline Kael described as “old-time, true-blue, all-American Republicans”).
Neeson, however, remains a stolid presence and tries too hard to seem funny. In the remake’s best joke, Neeson plays the son of Nielsen’s Drebin, bowing before his father’s portrait alongside colleagues who confess indebtedness that honors their forebears; they do this until the gimmick includes Naked Gun co-star O.J. Simpson. The joke goes so deep into Hollywood chagrin that the “laugh” curdles rather than tickles. This mishap reveals the core of Millennial Hollywood insensitivity, linked to director-writer Akiva Schaffer, co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, and producer Seth MacFarlane of TV’s Family Guy, who is often equally brilliant and obtuse. MacFarlane’s input seems Pavlovian.
Drebin Jr.’s investigation of a murder pairs Neeson with Pamela Anderson, whose personal career makeover carries less significance than Priscilla Presley’s comic teaming with Nielsen. Anderson’s made-up no-makeup look (a drawn puritanism) doesn’t ring bells like Nielsen did by twirling Presley in outré acrobatics and dance routines. The Neeson-Anderson pairing forces us to giggle at less, settling for less.
Before 9/11, Obama, Covid, and the Biden years killed comedy, ZAZ was able to parody American heroism and politics. The first Naked Gun movie began impressively, with a nightmare parody of American foreign policy: Drebin disrupted the terrorist conspiracy of Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Moammar Qaddafi, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and Mikhail Gorbachev. It proved as prescient about Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi catastrophe as Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult would be about future elaborate Academy Awards disasters. That ZAZ finale was equal to the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.
It’s fake erudition to pretend that the new Naked Gun equals ZAZ. This is fake cinephilia since ZAZ recognized the 1980s as the demise of the American-movie renaissance of the 1970s. ZAZ understood, before Quentin Tarantino, that corporate American filmmaking was about television knockoffs more than cinematic nostalgia. (Nostalgia is what I feel about Adam Sandler now working for Netflix, making extremely funny films in exile from theatrical movies.)
The new Naked Gun is nothing more than a gimmick based on the diminution of movies. ZAZ got away with it by being outrageously silly, but this version of The Naked Gun is silly distraction. And distraction (the word Obama recently used to defend himself against DNI-spurred investigation) is nothing more than a way to keep our minds off what’s going on politically. It’s a smoking gun of cultural cowardice.