Double take: "The Naked Gun"

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.

Magnum opus: "Amadeus"

All the right notes, in almost exactly the right order. It was just over forty years ago when Milos Forman's Amadeus landed among us as one of those fully formed masterpieces, and maybe it needed to be this complete in order to cut through: this was, after all, a film going against the grain of its junky, post-E.T., post-Raiders moment. It was literally classical, and yet it proved as crowdpleasing as any of the Mozart concertos that will draw standing ovations at the Proms in the weeks ahead. It was the handiwork of that Old Hollywood greybeard Saul Zaentz, one of several producers tapping the stageplays of Peter Shaffer for prestige purposes. Most loftily of all, it was about art, and the ways we come about it: some, like F. Murray Abraham's Salieri, grinding the gears, going through the motions, swearing off anything that resembles compromise to try and protect the modest skill they have, others - more flamboyant, instinctive creatives like Tom Hulce's Mozart, a tittering goofball seemingly ported over from one of the era's teen movies - pulling down inspiration from the heavens, making the complex seem easy, and using the time that frees to chase wine, women and anything else that catches their eye. Shaffer's generosity lay in showing how Mozart, too, had his issues, and in making the grudgeful, scheming, villainous antagonist more sympathetic than he might have been for those of us who will have many more days like Salieri than we ever will as Mozart: a dandified embodiment of imposter syndrome, someone who does everything asked of him in the pursuit of art and still can't pluck down anything to rival his lauded contemporary.

Forman, in turn, mounted a period piece that wasn't a stuffed shirt like Chariots of Fire or Gandhi, that found the life beneath these elaborate hats and hairpieces, and kept undercutting its own heady pomp and circumstance. In movie form, Amadeus remains largely a chamber piece, but those chambers become analogues for the busy hearts and minds of its characters, and the music brings everything to the surface anew; we're watching human beings, not well-posed mannequins. To some degree, Shaffer and Forman treat classical music like sport, as a pursuit you graft at day in day out, even on those days you aren't performing publicly. For Mozart-Salieri, read Borg-McEnroe, Senna-Prost or Pogačar-Vingegaard: the generational talent against the doughty tryhards left exasperated in their wake. We must pick a side to cheer, then, but even this proves pleasurably complicated. Abraham, in what was arguably the highpoint of a long and generally distinguished career, juggles two jobs with great skill. He's not just interpreting an understandably piqued soul, baffled as to why the same small handful of semibreves won't sit up for him the way they do for Mozart, but set to interpreting the very same music that irks him so; the best scenes are those in which the actor unpicks Mozart's genius, his layering of music, as well as any critic has done on the page. (If God speaks through Mozart, Shaffer surely speaks through Salieri.) Yet Hulce is too darned likable to be dismissed as a mere upstart or brat: here is an intruder from the New World set against the patrician Brits cast as courtiers, yes, but also someone who embodies new ways of thinking and doing, and the composer's gift for metabolising what more conventional ears hear as too many notes. The film's sole flaw is that it makes opera seem more fun than any real-world opera has ever been in the history of creation (we get four minutes of it, not four hours, which helps) but otherwise it stands up, and stands alone: all the film's success inspired, as far as I can tell, was Falco's Eurohit "Rock Me Amadeus", pink periwigs and all. (If not sport, then Forman was surely channelling the dress-me-up spirit of New Wave pop.) For almost three hours, Shaffer and Forman combined the best aspects of their antagonists' varied MOs: Amadeus is a film that worked very hard to seem as effortless as it does.

A 4K restoration of Amadeus is currently playing in selected cinemas, and is available on Blu-ray via Warner Bros.

On demand: "The Bad Guys"

There's a conceptual joke underpinning DreamWorks' 2022 digimation The Bad Guys that nudges it one step beyond Disney's similar Zootropolis. In a L.A. where humans and animals exist side-by-side, the appearance of ambulant, talking sharks, spiders and piranhas sparks as much alarm as it would in our world. So these societal outcasts have bonded together and committed themselves to a criminal cause: the opening scene, a U-rated riff on all things Tarantino, has ringleader Wolf (voice of Sam Rockwell, styled after George Raft) and slithering sidekick Snake (Marc Maron) chewing the fat in a diner before robbing the bank across the road. Thereafter, The Bad Guys keeps reconfiguring itself along the lines of various types of crime picture: first a heist movie rendered in pixels, an Ocean's 8-bit during which Wolf's charm offensive is explicitly described as "the full Clooney", later a prison break drama, at every turn seeking where possible to swerve the firm moral instruction even the generally entertaining Zootropolis succumbed to at points. Everything here is far too topsy-turvy for that. The real villain isn't any of the Bad Guys themselves, depicted as Robin Hood types, prone to bouts of conscience about the paths they're on, but the nefarious Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade), a two-faced guinea pig introduced as the recipient of a humanitarian prize, but who is later unmasked as having recruited our anti-heroes to do the worst of his dirty work for him. This is yet another spot of chicanery, and The Bad Guys proves beholden to that manic kids-pic motion that trails decent gags in its wake - an e-Captcha for spiders ("I'm not a tarantula"), the sight of the Wolf in an ovine sleepsuit (sheep's clothing, geddit) - but almost always causes one of these things to pass through the eyeballs and out the ears at top speed; keeping matters light and staying mobile ensures it never remotely gathers the depth or weight of, say, one of those comparable Miller/Lord contraptions (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Mitchells vs. the Machines). Worse, it accelerates straight past its best comic ideas (Prof. Marmalade's efforts to raise an army of guinea pigs - pfft, gone in a flash) and never allows us to savour the artistry of its pleasing magic-hour design. Nothing is allowed to stick: it's all a smash-and-grab. As it morphs once more, this time into a superhero-type affair, and cues up the Chemical Brothers' no less hyper "Go", you can feel yourself being prodded towards the door of Screen Five to make way for the next crowd of suckers - and I was sat watching it on my sofa at home.

The Bad Guys is available to stream via ITVX and to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Universal; a sequel, The Bad Guys 2, is currently in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Freaky Friday"

Freaky Friday forms a perky updating of the 1970s Jodie Foster flick, with Lindsay Lohan as the Avril Lavigne-alike teen who plays in a garage rock band and has, like, serious issues with the blonde high school president, and Jamie Lee Curtis as her stressed, overworked mother. One fortune cookie later, and the two have swapped bodies for the day, primarily to grasp vital life lessons, also so that these spoilt, materialistic Westerners can learn some kind of filial duty from the Chinese mother and daughter responsible for the swap. Overnight, Curtis becomes a spiteful ball of resentment making eyes at all the young boys; her daughter, meanwhile, is transformed into a neatfreak swearing off all physical contact. Out of all their live-action plots, this is the one most likely to get seasoned Disney execs in a flap unless handled with care and precision. The bodyswap premise is still disconcerting enough for the viewer to have to repeatedly remind themselves what exactly is going on, never more so than when Mark Harmon steps into the frame as Curtis's unwitting husband-to-be. Harmon plays the role as a blank dope, which only partially allays the film's underlying fear that a grown man is about to spend his wedding night with somebody with the mindset of an underage girl - or, even worse, with the underage girl herself.

As in the forthcoming family comedy School of Rock, though, shrewd scripting makes it possible to address all kinds of fears and other issues sparked by the presence of children in ways that are never tacky or patronising. Lohan is a more interesting screen presence than most Disney teens, and as for Curtis, well, if you are going to be limited to mother roles because of Hollywood's ongoing problems with the age of its actresses, this is the type of mother role you'd want to be offered: one that allows you to cut loose after a while. The great joy of this performance is that Curtis has realised the key to playing Lohan-in-Curtis's-body is not to approach the character as entirely distinct from her own, but as exactly the same character only with the difference of having shrugged off everything she's learnt over the past thirty years. It's funny stuff, seeing a formerly straitlaced shrink slumping in her chair or threatening violence against anybody who crosses her; the best scene in the entire movie is an unusually subversive Disney moment - a feminised version of Tyler Durden's speechifying in Fight Club - in which, while appearing on a primetime chatshow, this notionally responsible adult hymns the virtues of abandoning housework to eat takeout and listen to The Breeders. Mark Waters, director of the Parker Posey dysfunctional family comedy The House of Yes, milks this scene for everything it's worth: the calling card of another independently minded director moving effortlessly into the mainstream, if Freaky Friday inspires twelve-year-old girls to shun Westlife and Gareth Gates in favour of picking up a Ramones CD, it will all have been worthwhile.

(December 2003)

Freaky Friday is streaming via Disney+, available to rent via Prime Video and on DVD via Buena Vista Home Entertainment; a sequel, Freakier Friday, opens in cinemas nationwide this Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 25-27, 2025):

1 (new) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12A) **

2 (1) Superman (12A)

3 (new) The Bad Guys 2 (PG) [above]

4 (2) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)

5 (3) F1 (12A) ***

6 (10) Saiyaara (12A) ***

7 (4) Smurfs (U)

8 (5) I Know What You Did Last Summer (15)

9 (6) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

10 (7) 28 Years Later (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Amadeus

2. My Beautiful Laundrette

3. Friendship

4. Summer Wars

5. 40 Acres

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Lilo & Stitch (U)

2 (4) Sinners (15) ****

3 (new) Ballerina (15)

4 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

5 (5) Wicked: Part One (PG) **

6 (2) The Amateur (12)

7 (3) Karate Kid: Legends (PG)

8 (6) Thunderbolts* (12)

9 (25) The Bad Guys (U) **

10 (re) Oppenheimer (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Misericordia

2. Sinners

3. Black Bag

4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

5. The Surfer

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Point Break (Thursday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

2. The Shop Around the Corner (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.40pm)

3. Gladiator (Saturday, BBC One, 10.20pm)

4. The Two Faces of January (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. Long Shot (Friday, BBC One, 11.20pm)

Virtuosity: "Summer Wars"

2008's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time suggested director Mamoru Hosoda might have mastered one form of Japanese animation: the kind that while soaringly high of concept and possessed of action enough to appeal to the traditional fanbase of teenagers, also preserves a breezy, lyrical, emotionally satisfying core that could equally be savoured by grown-ups. Hosoda's 2009 follow-up Summer Wars, reissued in UK cinemas this weekend, considers just one of the ways in which society might break down in coming decades, but it does so from a distance, unfolding around a country retreat reminiscent of Mizoguchi or Kurosawa movies; it touches grass, in other words, and gives itself space to think. Young hero Kenji jumps at the chance of a summer job that would bring him closer to his beloved Natsuki, only to discover it's a non-paying position: pretending to be her boyfriend at the birthday party her family are throwing for their 90-year-old matriarch. While prepared to play along, Kenji opens up a can of worms between appointments when he accidentally breaches the security of Oz, a vast online social network; the consequent cybercollapse has knock-on effects in the real world, first taking out satnavs and e-mail accounts, and eventually threatening to bring about full-scale nuclear holocaust. Oopsie.

As an end-of-the-world speculation, it has as much of a sense of multiple events going on at once - a developing space-probe crisis, a high-school baseball championship - as any Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, yet Hosoda keeps turning his camera on lovely, evocative details: a soft drink can rattling on the ledge of a train window, a ferocious uncle's selection of faded motor-industry vests. In doing so, he anchors, keeps simple and makes surprisingly affecting a plot taking place in two realities at once. Oz is a busy, rainbow-coloured utopia, home to a staggering array of effects and possibilities - until it's taken over by a dark angel whose vast fist, made up of countless stolen avatars, snatches up the identities of online users. (AI fascism much?) But Hosoda delights in the real world, too: its history (much is made of the fact Natsuki's family are the descendants of samurai), its analogue diversions (a card game called Koi Koi becomes important during the finale), its messy human interactions (all the problems are caused by a black-sheep figure seeking the attention his nearest and dearest have thus far denied to him). A little more sedentary than its predecessor, it nevertheless confirms Hosoda as an animator with a rare feeling for character: the nervy hero, whose blushes seem to upload to his face, is very much in the lineage of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, making a mistake he then has to correct, but the movie's moral centre is Natsuki's grandmother, who hasn't been near a computer in her life, and knows how to get things done by, you know, actually talking to people in person.

Summer Wars opens in selected cinemas from Sunday.

Rinse and repeat: "My Beautiful Laundrette" at 40

Forty years ago, My Beautiful Laundrette would have been the jewel in the crown (or, as one character in the film puts it, "the jewel in the jacksie") of the annual Film on Four season: TV-adjacent but expansive, at once characterful and acutely alert to the ways of the wider world. This was a collision of worlds and sensibilities, both before and behind the camera. The screenwriter was the up-and-coming Hanif Kureishi, working towards a portrait of a close-knit Asian community in South London; at its centre, a genial second-generation loafer (Gordon Warnecke's Omar) drifting away from his alcoholic scold of a father (Roshan Seth) and falling under the influence of his garrulous entrepreneur uncle (Saeed Jaffrey), who entrusts the lad with overseeing the launch and running of his brand new laundrette. While so doing, Omar runs into an old crush, Johnny (a donkey-jacketed, Billy Idol-coiffed Daniel Day Lewis, pre-hyphen, pre-My Left Foot), who's spent the years since the pair last met running with a racist crowd. The director was Stephen Frears, who regards the London of 1985 as a location, a character, and just big enough to embrace all interested parties, even if those parties don't always get along. (It's not just the presence of the National Front; at one point, we get a Saeed Jaffrey-Ram John Holder dust-up.) The result was a film with quite a bit going on at the back and sides of its frames, too big, really, for telly: an opposites-attract romcom, but also a snapshot of the nation as it was in the middle of the Thatcher years, simultaneously booming and struggling. It was political to an extent, but it was mostly about muddle-headed people, and their complicated connection to the streets around them; there's an argument that Kureishi and Frears pre-empted Do the Right Thing by several years, putting Persil in the place of pizzas.

When I first saw My Beautiful Laundrette in my teens, it struck me as an ultra-modern love story; this time, I saw it much more as about the immigrant's tricky relationship with their adopted country, which means it speaks to the Britain of 2025 as much as it would have done to the Britain of 1985. (The laundrette was formerly called Churchill's, and though Omar replaces the sign, that name continues to hang heavy over everything that follows.) Jaffrey describes Britain as "this country which we love and hate"; the wounded Seth tells Omar "this country hates us, and all you can think of is to kiss their arses". This London is contested territory, both an extension and consequence of post-Partition India. The fresh-faced, homo-meets-Omo love story, processing from underpass to none-more-Eighties club to high street bricks-and-mortar, is engaging enough, though certain aspects struck me as sketchy this time round: how these lads met, whether Johnny's sick roommate (and maybe even a cough Day Lewis develops towards the end) is a closeted reference to AIDS, just how deeply Johnny is in with the far right. But the film is deceptively scaled and proves spacious in its generosity; you find yourself shifting its constituent elements around in your mind, like fixtures in a shop, and still alighting on pockets of life and interest. The relationship between the estranged brothers seemed to me more intriguing (and moving) this time, partly because Seth and Jaffrey are by far the most assured of the actors milling around here: one principled but lonely, bedridden and drinking himself into oblivion, the other morally compromised yet upwardly mobile. (Compare and contrast the women in their life.) In its rougher edges, My Beautiful Laundrette preserves the tensions of its moment - tensions that have scarcely dissipated in the intervening years - even if Frears strives to defuse them with a few laughs and smiles, the odd note of tenderness, and a tentative happy ending. It scrubs up nicely.

My Beautiful Laundrette returns to selected cinemas from today.