Why The Naked Gun Is the Unexpected Power Move America Desperately Needs Right Now — Unlock the Shocking Truth!
When Leslie Nielsen first brought his Police Squad badge to the big screen in 1988’s The Naked Gun, there was a giddy disconnect between the sight of a white-haired, stentorian-voiced actor who looked your family physician and the frisky cut-up who would literally stoop to anything for a laugh, whether that meant shimmying into a full-body condom before sex or forgetting to take off his microphone before heading to the urinal. Nielsen had come up through the B-movie ranks as a serious, if underutilized, actor. But once he committed grand larceny every second he was on screen in 1980’s Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker masterpiece Airplane!, a new career path opened up for him. He was finally taken seriously…by being profoundly unserious. Ironically, it was the pivot that finally made him a movie star.
Liam Neeson doesn’t need to worry about becoming a movie star. He already is one. But the same disconnect that worked so perfectly for Nielsen works the same sort of magic for the Irishman. Over the long sweep of his career, Neeson has shuffled through countless incarnations—genre heavy, stoic period-piece hero, romantic lead, Oskar Schindler, more period-piece heroism, and finally ubiquitous AARP action avenger who you didn’t want to fuck with. I’m probably not the only one who worried that his most recent onscreen persona as seen in Taken, The Commuter, Non-Stop, etc. would become his final, defining pigeonhole. But the gonzo comedy of The Naked Gun fits him like a bespoke suit. Who knew? Well, anyone who’d witnessed his cheeky, self-deflating cameos on The Simpsons and in Ted 2, that’s who. Even so, the new Naked Gun manages to pack a surprising joy-buzzer thrill.
Co-written and directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer (check out his unsung 2016 gem Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, stat!), the new Naked Gun gleefully leans into its loony idiocy. Neeson plays the son of Nielsen’s Frank Drebin (with a welcome assist from Paul Walter Hauser as the son of George Kennedy’s Ed Hocken). He’s an oblivious detective for the LAPD and he has a knack for barely noticing when all hell breaks loose around him—the clueless eye of a swirling hurricane. The puns are often so bad they’re great and you can see most of the banana-peel mayhem coming from a mile away. But even though there are a ton of jokes that elicit a groan rather than a genuine chuckle, the hit-to-miss ratio is impressively high. It’s a worthy successor. Frank Sr. would be proud.
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