The Naked Gun review - farce, slapstick and crass stupidity

The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and Nineties and starred the incomparable Leslie Nielsen as the preposterous detective Frank Drebin, but for this regenerated version Liam Neeson has stepped up to the plate.

Neeson has become synonymous with his celebrated “very particular set of skills”, though farce and light comedy have not usually been among them (we perhaps tend to associate him more with savage revenge dramas). Nonetheless, he successfully raises a few chuckles here.

He plays Frank Drebin Junior, son of Nielsen’s original (there’s a barbed little gag where a roll-call of police officers all pay tearful homage to portraits of their fathers, with the exception of the son of OJ Simpson, Detective Nordberg). Frank Jr’s modus operandi is very much in the family tradition of “situation normal, all f***ed up”, though Neeson has tried to put a sympathetic spin on his character by explaining that “he does the wrong thing but with the right attitude” (pictured below, Neeson gets serious).

We first meet him in an opening sequence of a police stake-out of a bank hold-up, where raiders are holding hostages. A young schoolgirl who looks about nine skips blithely into the bank, and when challenged by a surly gunman peels off a Mission: Impossible-style prosthetic face-mask to reveal… Frank Drebin Jr!

Once we’re past this, the plot, such as it is, concerns the death in a car accident – or was it? – of Simon Davenport, whereupon his sister Beth (Pamela Anderson) comes to Drebin for help in solving the case. Anderson proves to be the big surprise, as she delivers a splendid turn as a larger-than-life femme fatale, complete with a farcical scat-singing interlude on stage with a nightclub band. A scene shot as though through an infra-red lens, involving Anderson and Neeson (and a dog) apparently engaged in luridly obscene acts, is the film’s best laugh-out-loud moment.

Integral to the story is bombastic baddie Richard Cane (hammed up to the hilt by Danny Huston). He runs a monolithic operation called Edentech, and seems to be a kind of fusion of Elon Musk, Darth Vader and Amazon. In addition, he has a gadget which can trigger a catastrophic “reality reset”, which Crane likes to call “Project Inferno”. It isn’t entirely clear, but this somehow seems to bring about the intervention of a giant magic snowman, to the accompaniment of Starship’s 1987 schlocktacular hairdresser-classic “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”.

Helmed by comedy veteran Akiva Schaffer and produced by Seth “Family Guy” MacFarlane, the reborn Naked Gun sticks to the familiar formula of ludicrous set-ups and slapstick sight gags. Drebin’s coffee addiction is a running theme, with a mystery hand even appearing through his car window to hand him a cup as he speeds down the freeway. He also has a penchant for snapping phones in half after every call, whether it’s a mobile or a landline

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of head-bangingly obtuse verbal banter, such as: “You can’t fight City Hall.” “No, it’s a building.” When Beth first appears in his office, Drebin invites her to “have a chair”. “No, I have plenty at home,” she demurs. She tells Drebin she went to college. Drebin: “UCLA?” Beth: “I see it every day. I live here.”

You get the drift. It’s no all-time classic, but it delivers a decent dose of guffaws. And it’s only 85 minutes long.

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