Who was Jack the Ripper? What’s the meaning of life? Or, one of the newest ones, why does Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., who’s apparently in his thirties, look like 73-year-old Liam Neeson? Have any of them crossed your minds?
Fortunately, I have answers for the last one. The first is that it’s who director Akiva Schaffer and producer Seth MacFarlane cast in their new legacy sequel, The Naked Gun. The second is that it’s funny, the same logic that the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams used throughout their works, including the film’s source show Police Squad.
Anyway, Frank is on the case when a dude turns up dead in an electric car. He thinks it’s suicide, but the dead man’s sister, Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), disagrees. A little, actual police work leads Frank to the dead man’s employer, Richard Cane (Danny Huston). Cane, unsurprisingly, is the big bad, whose literally named P.L.O.T. Device makes people needlessly violent. It’s up to Frank to stop Cane from using the device on New Year’s Eve. It’s also up to Frank to, maybe, convince city hall from shutting down Police Squad. Yeah, that’s also a thing.
These filmmakers, much like the ZAZ trio, never waste an opportunity for a joke. Whatever's funny, even a tangent with a killer Frosty the Snowman, is the logic of the day. A take-off on a certain scene in Mission Impossible: Fallout was especially enjoyable. Speaking of Mission Impossible, longtime series composer Lorne Balfe's often serious score is great contrast to the lunacy. Granted, not all of them can be winners (a variation of a certain Austin Powers gag went on too long), but nearly all of them hit. I can't give away too many of them, because, as The Joker once said, "if you have to explain a joke, there is no joke!" You'll have to see them all for yourself.
Of course, Neeson's ridiculous attitude and dead-serious delivery is the film's best joke. To put it one way, it's as if his Frank thinks he's in Taken instead of The Three Stooges. He's hilariously petulant when Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) reprimands him for his cowboy cop ways ("since when do cops have to follow the law?"). Still, that moment is surprisingly profound - even for a minute. I would complain about his tragic backstory being just exposition if the film didn't treat it as a joke. It's an amusing one, by the way. He has great chemistry with Anderson, who makes for an equally silly femme fatale parody. Huston, meanwhile, is a wonderfully smug villain who thinks he's all that, but he's really not.
What else do we have? Well, it's semi-disappointing that the older films' police car opening gag wasn't reprised here. In its place, however, there's a great title gag, and an impressive end credits gag. We also get a few good supporting players with cop Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), henchman Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand), and a nameless bartender (Cody Rhodes). That's not going into all the celebrity cameos, including one blink and you'll miss it cameo in the end. Sadly, I blinked.
I was already watching the first Naked Gun plenty of times before I was ten. Sure, I didn't understand most of it, but I understood its wackiness a bit. Now that I'm older, I think that this Naked Gun does right by its famous franchise and its creators. Some folks might disagree, but anyone who wants nothing but laughs for 85 minutes will get their money's worth. And then some. Now, I can say that's it for now.
Sit back, because next time, I don't think I'll be reviewing something funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment