Producers: Tim Bevan, Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke, Catherine Farrell, Eric Fellner and Robert Graf   Director: Ethan Coen   Screenplay: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke   Cast: Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Lera Abova, Billy Eichner, Kristen Connolly, Gabby Beans, Lena Hall, Don Swayze, Josh Pafchek, Kale Browne, Alexander Carstoiu, Christian Antidormi, Kinna McInroe and Kara Petersen   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C-

This second film in the projected “lesbian genre” trilogy of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke starts out promisingly, with clever opening titles splashed across locations in Bakersfield, California, where “Honey Don’t!” is set.  Unfortunately, things go downhill pretty consistently from there, resulting in a disjointed would-be comic thriller that winds up pretty much an incoherent mess, filled with plenty of gruesomely-dispatched corpses but making precious little sense.

It does, however, afford ample opportunity to appreciate beautiful Margaret Qualley, who as Honey O’Donahue wears the costumes designed by Peggy Schnitzer like a model, the meticulously coiffured jet-black hair and generously applied lipstick adding to the effect.  When donning long slacks, a shiny blouse and high heels, she looks like a true femme fatale from forties noir, though in luscious color provided by cinematographer Ari Wegner rather than noirish black-and-white.  Coen and Wegner were clearly taken by the image, since the movie frequently focuses lovingly on her as she strides purposely toward or away from the camera, her long legs pumping and blouse shimmering and those heels clicking on the tiles or pavement.  A pity she never has anywhere interesting to go.

Moreover Honey’s not a femme fatale in the traditional sense at all, though she can mete out punishment to malefactors as effectively as Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe used to—she’s a modern-day private investigator drawn into a whodunit as complicated as the one Marlowe faced in “The Big Sleep.”  In this instance, though, the complications feel random and coincidental, and often only tangentially related to the central purported mystery.

That begins with the death of Mia Novotny (Kara Petersen) in a car crash.  She was a prospective client of Honey’s, though for what reason we’re not told, and though her demise is initially written off by investigating cop Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), an irritating dweeb who keeps asking Honey for a date though she always declines by telling him she likes girls, as an accident, we know better: prior to Honey’s arrival at the scene we’ve seen slinky Cher (Lera Abova) retrieve an incriminating ring from Mia’s corpse.

That ring is emblazoned with the seal of the cultish Four-Way Church run by repulsive Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), who preaches submission to his congregation, largely composed of young women, whom he beds before, presumably, trafficking them.  He’s also, it turns out, in league with the French drug outfit Cher represents, though his delivery operation is a slapdash affair staffed by inept assistants, as evidenced when one of them, Hector (Jacnier), accidentally kills Colligan (Christian Antidormi), a client who can’t pay for his order.  That leads Devlin to try to clean up the mess by ordering a hit on Hector and his beloved grandmother (Gloria Sandoval).  But Shuggie (Josh Pafchek), assigned to whack Hector, bungles the job, leading to further complications as Hector attacks Devlin.

While all that is going on, Honey has family matters on her mind.  Her sister Heidi (Kristen Connelly) asks for help with her wayward daughter Corinne (Talia Ryder), who’s involved with a brutish boyfriend (Alexander Carstoiu).  She takes care of that by beating the guy up, but meanwhile Corinne’s scared off by the sudden appearance of a creepy old guy (Kale Browne), who turns out to be Honey’s long-absent father.  It’s an intuition that Corinne might have sought refuge with Devlin’s cult, as well as an interview with Mia’s mother (Kinna McInroe), that leads Honey to the Reverend’s church; needless to say, he’s not forthcoming about anything. 

An additional plot thread has Honey getting sexually involved with MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who runs the department’s evidence room.  That results in a couple of steamy scenes of intimacy, but the relationship takes a weird twist when Honey tracks down MG at home and finds that the woman has some serious secrets.  The turn does result in one of the movie’s more effective sequences, though, as Honey investigates the interior of the cop’s childhood home, nicely imagined by production designer Stefan Dechant—a scene that might remind you of Lila Crane’s walkthrough of the Bates mansion, even if what follows is somewhat of a head-scratcher.

Even there, however, Qualley maintains her poise, which is certainly more than can be said of the rest of the cast, who chew the scenery with relish.  Evans, Plaza and Day are the worst offenders, but they’re just doing the best they can with the material Coen and Cooke have supplied them with.  As editor (with Emily Denker) Cooke compounds her share of blame, unable to blend the disparate plot threads into a smooth whole.  She’s unable, for example, to give Gabby Beans, as Honey’s secretary Spider, anything to do but look on helplessly, or to offer any resolution to the subplot about Honey’s father, or to integrate a sidebar involving a weeping client (Billy Eichner) seeking Honey’s help in determining whether his partner is having an affair fluently into the narrative.  The denouement, involving Honey and Cher, has a kittenish ambiguity, but nothing more.  Even the score by the usually inventive Carter Burwell is below par.

The title of the movie invites a dismissive assessment, of course.  So here it is: Don’t bother.  

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.