Producers: Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggin Director: Akiva Schaffer Screenplay: Akiva Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, Kevin Durand, Liza Koshy, Michael Beasley, Cody Rhodes, CCH Pounder, Busta Rhymes, Michael Bisping, Eddy Yu and Moses Jones Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Grade: C-
The lesson of the new “Naked Gun” is that what matters isn’t the number of jokes delivered per minute, but the number that actually elicit a laugh. Akiva Schaffer’s revival of the wacky spoof of police procedural clichés that the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (ZAZ for short) brought to the big screen in 1988 (after their “Police Squad” TV sitcom tanked six years earlier) has plenty of the former, but sadly few of the latter. Its hit-to-miss ratio is lamentably low.
Liam Neeson, trading the heroic persona of his unintentionally ludicrous string of action thrillers for something that actually tries to be funny, resurrects the character of Frank Drebin, the blissfully boobish cop, sort of an American version of Inspector Clouseau, whom Leslie Nielsen played to perfection in the original movie and its lesser sequels.
Actually Neeson’s character is Drebin’s son Drebin Jr., but the guy’s inherited his dad’s job and his obliviously nitwit genes. He’s also dedicated to winning his dead daddy’s seal of approval, as shown in one of the movie’s best bits early on, when he does homage at a plaque honoring the elder Drebin’s accomplishments. But what sells the moment isn’t junior’s tearful speech, but the fact that the plaque is just one in a long line of them, and we pan over to Drebin’s partner Ed Hocken Jr. (a wasted Paul Walter Hauser, much better—if more briefly—featured in “Fantastic Four”) doing the same before a plaque honoring his father, Frank Sr.’s old captain Ed Sr. (George Kennedy), and then to the capper—a cop (Moses Jones) looking at the plaque dedicated to his father, Detective Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), only to turn to the audience and shrug.
But Junior isn’t really like Senior. Yes, he’s obtuse, but Nielson’s Drebin was a deadpan embodiment of the clueless by-the-book man, while Neeson’s is the angry guy for whom no rules exist, and whose flouting of protocol not only drives Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) up the wall but threatens the existence of Police Squad itself. So after Drebin single-handedly foils a bank robbery by impersonating a little girl with a lollipop—a wildly over-the-top but overlong and violent opening gambit that mimics a James Bond prologue—Davis relegates him to investigating a fatal car crash.
But of course the car crash turns out to be related to the bank job, since the car was an electric one manufactured by the empire owned by Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who’s revealed early on as the mastermind behind the robbery—we see his henchman Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand) delivering a gizmo labeled “P.L.O.T. Device” that he’s swiped from a safety deposit box, the real object of the heist. The Bond connection also applies, because Cane’s plot proves a Blofeld-level scheme to reduce the world’s population to its basic animal instincts in order to allow for the remaking of society by a master elite, which in this case means oligarchs, destined to rule by reason not of intellect, which in most cases appears to be in very short supply, but simply wealth. The car case also introduces Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), the sister of the victim who’s convinced that her brother was murdered by his boss Cane and is determined to investigate the “accident” herself. Inevitably she and Drebin will become partners in sleuthing, and something more.
As “Gun” proceeds, the details of Cane’s nefarious scheme grow more and more central to the script fashioned by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, and as they do the picture grows increasingly cumbersome and dull, especially since Huston is given so little to do except grin malevolently (while engaging in some of the crudely sexual stuff that passes for humor). Durand fares every more poorly, though one sequence where he’s tricked into revealing information by an elaborate tactic works by reason of its inane complexity.
But long before we get to the big finale, in which Drebin finally gets the sign from his father he’s long waited for, and a mano-a-mano confrontation between him and Cane ends in a pretty good joke in the vein of the shooting-the-swordsman scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” this “Gun” has made its biggest mistake in just trying too hard, as in a scene in which Sig spies on Frank and Beth and his special binoculars mistakenly interpret what they’re up to in smutty terms, or a surreal sequence when the two have a romantic evening during which they imagine a ménage à trois with a snowman that turns killer out of jealousy, or the impromptu jazz riff Beth engages in to distract Cane in his club, which seems to go on forever. The inclination to pummel you over the head extends even to the gag during the final credits crawl, which would be fine at half the length but is cruelly overextended. (Of course, one can’t blame editor Brian Scott Olds for not trimming more energetically; as it is, the movie barely runs eighty-five minutes.)
To a certain extent the tendency always to go for broke derives from the very different way Neeson plays Drebin compared to Nielsen. The latter was serenely oblivious to all the damage he was doing, and played even the most raucous bits without breaking a sweat. Neeson, on the other hand, is all furious mugging, whether he’s complaining about the videos of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” he’s assiduously collected being erased or arguing furiously that he’s innocent when being framed for murder even as he’s clutching the corpse. (Best simply to ignore the dash cam footage of him suffering after eating something that didn’t agree with him, or the sight of him dangling from the ceiling with his pants gone.) Despite that jazz-riffing sequence, Anderson fares better. And for those interested in keeping an eye out for celebrity cameos, be advised that there are a few here, including one by pro wrestler Cody Rhodes, who should be advised to reserve his acting for the ring.
In other words, like so many of the spoofs that aped the ZAZ formula, this new “Gun” feels forced, exuding an air more of desperation than of amiable stupidity. As shot by cinematographer Brandon Trost with a decent production design by Bill Brzeski and a dutifully zany score by Lorne Balfe, it looks and sounds fine. And it has the occasional sight gag or idiotic non-sequitur that will bring a smile to your lips. But if you want to see this sort of cleverly dumb rapid-fire comedy at its best, revisit ZAZ’s “Airplane!” (1980), the granddaddy of all the goofy parody flicks, and still the funniest of the bunch. Surely.