The new take on The Naked Gun is broadly fine: fast and more often funny than not, it adds a welcome note of levity to a movie summer that has so far been defined by megabudget retreads. (If the studios are looking back to the 1990s, as the F1 movie suggested, they'd do well to remember that blockbuster season was once generous enough to embrace action and comedy and teen pics and starry romances: something for everyone, on the grandest imaginable scale.) Viewed in isolation, Akiva Schaffer's film is also somewhat tentative, the work of a system testing the commercial waters (to see if post-Covid audiences can be tempted out for a brand they know and maybe love) and creatives caught between paying irreverent homage to their inspiration and going their own way entirely. Schaffer - who bubbled up with the Lonely Island troupe, made his big-screen debut with 2007's amusing Hot Rod and was most recently seen reviving Chip 'n' Dale for Disney+ with 2022's Rescue Rangers - brings a certain pop-cultural savvy to his task (riffs on the Black Eyed Peas and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the OJ Simpson gag you'll have seen in the trailer); with co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, he expands the cop-spoof remit via those tropes that have taken hold over the past three decades (the sudden prevalence of coffee cups in the procedural form, the no-nonsense Black station chief, played here not by S. Epatha Merkerson, but CCH Pounder). More generally, the writers have gone looking for analogues to the original's smart-dumb jokes ("Cigar?" "Looks like it to me"; Drebin's bad driving; an episode of pantslessness). Through to an endscroll that revives the lost ZAZ art of inserting spoof credits ("Fart Co-Ordinator", "Tennis Grips", "Ranch Dressing"), the aim is to make us laugh out of recognition - to give us something that sounds like something we laughed at first time around - rather than surprise or shock. This, too, is fan service, or a comedy equivalent of those live-action animations that have been doing the multiplex rounds: a faithful reproduction of that cartoon you've already enjoyed.
The new film is at its most 21st century in deciding who forms the butt of its jokes. The villain is a sneering tech bro (Danny Huston, channelling any number of suspects) with plans to deploy his expensive kit to reorder the world as he sees fit. And this year's Drebin, though notionally the son of the character who headed up TV's Police Squad and its three big-screen spinoffs, is somehow even more of a relic than his predecessor. Where the nimble Leslie Nielsen downplayed the bungling cop as a throwback to the 1950s B-movies he'd apprenticed in, deadpanning for comic gold, Liam Neeson's Drebin Jr. is a permanently baffled Neanderthal, a pale stale male furious about everything from Janet Jackson's infamous Superbowl appearance to the promotional ads that play before online videos. The growling figure Neeson cut in those lousy Taken films is here cranked a further notch towards ridiculous: entirely interchangeable with a cameoing action star come the finale, this Drebin takes a grim, thin-lipped pleasure from offing his foes, and ends the film by punching out the camera. Neeson slaps a laugh out of us, but I'll confess to missing Nielsen's subtler sleight-of-hand, his ability to conjure a chuckle out of even his unworthiest material. The star does, however, fit the new movie's wider reframing of the police squad as an innately preposterous, archaic, sometimes outright racist and brutish concept - before fending off any accusations of undue liberal-Hollywood wokery via an especially filthy sequence involving a heatcam. (Seth MacFarlane, of Family Guy and Ted fame, is among the producers here.) Appreciably daft with the odd moment of genuine comic inspiration (a car chase intersection with two glaziers carrying a windscreen across the road, some business with interlocking interview rooms), this is essentially Naked Gun karaoke, a cheap, raucous, enjoyable night out. The lesson Paramount will draw if the film hits big will presumably be to make another one; backing entirely original comedies, with budgets enough to spring their gags off the studio sets to which Schaffer's have been carefully confined, would be the real sign of progress.
The Naked Gun is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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