‘The Naked Gun’ Review

As close as you’ll get to the gag-a-minute wordplay of classic ZAZ comedy.

Paul Walter Hauser and Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun. (Courtesy Paramount Pictures, via MovieStillsDB)

THIS IS A POTENTIALLY WEIRD ADMISSION, but I’ve always found something vaguely intimidating about the classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedies of years past, movies like Airplane! and Top Secret and The Naked Gun. Yes, they’re funny, but they’re almost too funny, as if they’re going to collapse under the weight of their own joke density. When every page has a gag or three—a pun or a play on words or just something remarkably silly occurring in the foreground—I find it almost uncomfortable to watch. My eyes go wide like Dave Bowman traversing the Monolith’s stargate, sensory bombardment burning out my brain’s funny fuses one after the other.

The joke density (and the number of missed jokes) is increased by the fact that these were always very writerly movies, movies that played on common phrases and assumptions and wording. My favorite example of this has always been Airplane’s running “But that’s not important right now,” in which a dangling modifier is exploited for comedic effect.¹ These are, basically, English teacher jokes, but they land every time because, even after you start to expect them, they’re still incongruous enough to be funny and the exasperated look on the face of the actor who used the misplaced “it” conveys our own sense of absurdity at the question.

The new Naked Gun does many things correctly, from casting a straight man with wonderful comedic timing (Liam Neeson) in the role of Frank Drebin Jr.—a mid-2010s efforts to reboot the series was apparently going to be helmed by traditionally comic actor Ed Helms, which would have been an enormous mistake—to leaning into the absurdity of rebooting something so ridiculous by paying homage to the lore of the series. But the thing it does most correctly is ape that joke density: Lonely Island alum Akiva Schaffer, who cowrote alongside Doug Mand and Dan Gregor (with an assist from producer Seth MacFarlane), understands that a Naked Gun movie needs to have so many jokes you’re likely to miss some of them the first time around.

Indeed, that joke density is one reason I’m hesitant to say that the film never addresses the glaring bit of theft at the heart of the plot, which is that tech billionaire Richard Cane’s (Danny Huston) plan to cleanse the world via an electromagnetic pulse that sends plebs into a murderous frenzy is rather brazenly lifted right from Kingsman: The Secret Service. But maybe the “borrowing” is so obvious that the name of the MacGuffin—the P.L.O.T. Device—is an implicit critique of Matthew Vaughn’s movie. Who can say?

Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson. (Courtesy Paramount Pictures via MovieStillsDB)

Regardless, a Naked Gun movie is a little like porn: You’re doing it wrong if you’re watching it for the plot. We’re here for gags and goofs and riffs on tropes, like the increasingly absurd ways in which cops are handed cups of coffee or Drebin intrudes on his overwhelmed boss Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) in her home life. Schaffer deftly combines obtuse wordplay (“Take a chair.” “No thanks, I have a plenty at home.”²) and absurd imagery (Neeson in a schoolgirl outfit disarming bank robbers in a riff on the opening sequence of The Dark Knight) with pure fantasy (Drebin and girlfriend Beth Davenport [Pamela Anderson] bringing a snowman to life for an erotic adventure in a mountain cabin). They don’t all land, but that’s the good thing about black-hole-levels of joke density: If one doesn’t work, you’ll get sucked into another in short order.

I am, honestly, curious to see how audiences react to the film’s sense of humor, which has been somewhat sidelined in recent years. The comedy is rarely referential and the references are often amusingly dated (for instance, the extended riff on the Black Eyed Peas and their hit 2003 song, “Let’s Get Retarded”). And much modern humor is driven by people being put into ridiculous situations and then yelling about how ridiculous everything is; everyone in this film plays every insane thing with a totally straight face, as if it’s totally natural for, say, detective Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) to find himself handing out free beers to kids at a UFC-style fight. There’s an accepted goofiness that has felt entirely absent from the rare big-screen comedies we still get.

Ultimately, the only thing I can really say about The Naked Gun is that I laughed a bunch and chuckled mirthfully even at the jokes that didn’t fully hit. We don’t get many theatrical comedic efforts like this one, so enjoy it while you can.

1. E.g.: “You’d better tell the captain we’ve got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.” “A hospital? What is it?” “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.” The new one was funny enough to inspire my own attempt at the genre, to mixed results.

2. Again, the joke density here is such that I might not have gotten the wording precisely correct; blame my slow writing and the dark theater and the fact that I was probably writing down something I heard three jokes ago.