Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun might be the riskiest attempt at a legacy sequel in recent memory. It attempts to resurrect not just a dormant franchise, but the cinematic spoof genre as a whole after it was beaten to death by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer in the mid-aughts. Schaffer has been almost single-handedly keeping the genre on life support since his 2007 feature directorial debut, Hot Rod. And while The Naked Gun isn’t an unmitigated success like Schaffer’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Chip n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers, it’s also a much purer, freewheeling spoof, with a lower barrier of entry that serves it well.
This isn’t a film that plays much inside baseball. One notable exception is a gag centered around the loss of nearly every major cast member from the original films, and Schaffer and co-screenwriters Doug Mand and Dan Gregor have the smarts to get it out the way early. In the scene, the cops in the new Police Squad, including Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), pay their respects to paintings of their parents, but Nordberg Jr. (Moses Jones), faced with a painting of O.J. Simpson, hilariously opts out.
You may worry that this Naked Gun will go completely serious on audiences. There’s some lip service paid to the idea of Frank as a hyper-masculine relic of law enforcement, and when tech magnate Richard Cane (Danny Huston) enters the picture, it looks like Frank might feel a sense of kinship with Cane and the cadre of rich, impotent white guys who think the world would be better off with less accountability for people like them. But the filmmakers are also smart enough to know not to kill the vibe with a state-of-humanity address.
It helps that the film has no problem mercilessly clowning on these people, as evidenced by a running (and relatively tame) gag about red light-emitting machines for boosting sperm having fried the men from the waist down. Schaffer’s Naked Gun may remind us that more than just cops have problems, but it’s more keen to tickle us with one gloriously stupid gag after another.
Though a few of those gags may go on longer than necessary, this is a very-little-filler-mostly-killer affair that revels in lampooning more than just the clichés of police procedurals. Frank and Ed are constantly being handed fresh cups of coffee for no reason at any location, and a line about Miranda rights gets twisted into a riff on Sex and the City. Elsewhere, one gut-busting Mission: Impossible parody goes two twists further than its source into absolute madness.
Through it all, Neeson and Pamela Anderson, as Beth Davenport, feel particularly “in” on the jokes—Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley, by contrast, mostly played their original characters as serious as a heart attack—and their endearing looseness is buoyed by the go-for-broke nature of the comedic beats. Around the time the two use a book of necromancy to bring a snowman to life who stalks them like a killer in a ’90s suspense flick, grounded reality is in the rearview.
The Naked Gun is of a piece with the “joke in every frame” approach that Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker brought to their best work—an approach that’s at odds with just about every other modern live-action comedy, where dialogue-based, Judd Apatow-style riffing still largely holds sway. The film proves that the spoof still has life as a genre, especially for the way it ribs our love of the overblown action blockbusters. The way Schaffer and company see it, if audiences are open enough to the absurdities of, say, Fast X and the Mission: Impossible films, it’s a hilariously short jump to meet this version of The Naked Gun where it lives.
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