Series Minded: The Nakeds Gun

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop. This one kind of snuck up on me. I wasn't expecting to re-watch the original Naked Gun trilogy for the new film's debut, but I enjoyed rewatching the first so much I had to watch them all].

The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad! (1998, d. David Zucker - netflix)
The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991, d. David Zucker - netflix)  
The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994, d. Peter Segal - netflix)
The Naked Gun (2025, d. Akiva Schaffer - in theatre)

Parody films used to be so bankable, both as financial successes at the box office and as tremendous sources of big time laffs, chuckles and guffaws (not to mention titters and chortles). But the parody film has become something rather derided in the past decade or two, in no small part thanks to the prolific output of the "Not Another X Movie" series which treated mere reference as comedy and relied on being gross, crass, or punching down on others as their default mode. But even when parodies were in the hands of parody maestros, like Buck Henry, Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker trio, The Naked Gun stood apart.

Leslie Nielsen would go on to star in a slew of parody films following The Naked Gun but to greatly diminished returns. They replied upon Nielsen's comedic persona almost entirely, what they lacked was a central character like Detective Frank Drebin that was a defined suit of comedy armour for Nielsen to wear. Of course, Nielsen had debuted the character in the short lived TV series Police Squad! six years earlier, so the character had already been built and tested. 

I had forgotten how central to The Naked Gun comedy engine Frank Drebin is. He's not a buffoon, yet he can be. He's not oblivious, but he often is. He's awful at his job, but also very successful. He's a mix of the hardboiled detective from film noir and the jaded shoot-first, ask-questions-later cop of the Dirty Harry movies. He's a walking talking cliche that constantly defies the cliche. By the nature of the cliche, Drebin is poker-face serious at all times (except when he needs to react to something, at which point Nielsen's comic mugging is rivalled only by the likes of Jim Carrey) and delivers every line like he's chewed on the words for a millennium even though it's clear he hasn't really thought them through at all. 

Drebin is the primary joke delivery vehicle for The Naked Gun series and why it works so well is because the cliche is so well-worn and time tested and reused ad nauseum, that even a thorough lampooning of the character and story tropes do not diminish the effectiveness of the tropes.  With Austin Powers lampooning the Bond cliches so thoroughly, Bond and spy movies had to evolve from the cliches. Detective and police stories didn't budge an inch after The Naked Gun.

The Naked Gun and its first sequel weren't just keen on parody though. They are joke machines, set-up and punchline followed by wordplay followed by background visual gag followed by slapstick followed by callback followed by character-centric joke followed by topical joke followed by surprise cameo followed by fourth wall break followed by political gag followed by pop culture poke followed by innuendo followed by overt sexual joke followed by non-sequitur, inanity, and silliness... all swirling down the same drain intermixing and popping up again.

The big surprise of the series' first cinematic entry, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, was not only how damn funny it still remains (even outside of nostalgia and intense familiarity) but how little (if at all) it uses punching down in its comedy.  Likewise it was surprising to me, given that David Zucker fell down a right wing rabbit hole in the 2000s, how snarky and satirically scathing they were of the police, Republicans, and jingoism. At one point in the first film, Drebin is asked to hand in his badge and gun and states "Just think, next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested." 

Plot is kind of besides the point in these films, and yet, at their core the first two films still have a meaningful (if irreverent) caper for Drebin to foil in and an emotional arc for him, centered around his love affair with Jane (Prescilla Presley, who the first film convinced a 12-year-old Kent was the most beautiful woman in the world).

The first Naked Gun has O.J. Simpson's (I know!) Nordberg getting shot up during a drug stakeout at the L.A. docks. This coincides with the impending visit from Queen Elizabeth II. In investigating the shooting Police Squad links the events at the docs with prosperous businessman Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán) who happens to be the main host and sponsor of the Queen's visit.  Paying a visit to Ludwig's office, Frank and Jane spark an immediate attraction, and Ludwing sends Jane after Frank to find out what he knows. One safe-sex-joke-that-I-totally-didn't-get-when-I-was-12 and a delightfully silly montage later, they're a steadfast couple. But not so fast... of course Frank quickly suspects that she was using him for Ludwig's benefit so they have a romantic complication to overcome as, during the third act, Frank needs to save the Queen from being assassinated at a baseball game. Though perhaps a big detour from the detective/cop genre the film is lampooning, the baseball sequence finds an insane amount of gags from Frank's impersonation of an opera singer for the national anthem (of which he doesn't fully know the words, but then who really does if we're being honest?), to him impersonating an umpire and getting too into the audience adulation for his positive calls for the home team, to him trying to pat down the players throughout the game to check for guns. All that plus getting to watch O.J. as Nordberg get accidentally abused and tortured over and over and over again is its own kind of schadenfreude.

The second (and a half) film finds the comedy less omnipresent than its predecessor, largely because it's a bit more stuck in its time, yet it still has much the same snap as the first. Frank and Police Squad are in Washington D.C. for a Presidential commendation, which finds Frank interacting with George and Barbara Bush, replete with Frank accidentally delivering all manner of assaults and insults upon poor Barbara over and over again. (The George Bush impersonator is caked in thick make-up to a distracting degree, which, really, you couldn't just nab Dana Carvey?). President Bush announces he's deferring his entire energy policy to one man, Dr. Meinheimer (Richard Griffiths), who it turns out that Jane now works for. Frank and Jane split up before their wedding and Frank is heartbroken. Jane is now with oil baron Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet), who is secretly running a cabal of energy industry leaders, and they're plotting to fix Bush's energy policy by replacing Meinheimer with a double.  Of course Frank gets in the way, in no small part thanks to Jane's connections to it all. One awkward encounter after another, the pair reunite and they have wild night at the pottery turner (if you don't know the Ghost reference it just becomes a delicious bit of absurdity). After a disastrous incident with a tank, Police Squad is no more, but Frank, Ed, Nordberg and the real Dr. Hapsburg infiltrate the state dinner (as a mariachi band no less) where the fake Hapsburg is to present his fake energy policy and stop a nuclear bomb. Hapsburg nearly manages to escape but is interrupted by a beautifully orchestrated callback. 

The (thirty-three and a) third movie moves itself squarely into the 90's. By this point the spoof movie had taken off with National Lampoon and Mel Brooks back in the game quite heavily, so it seems there was a pivot.  Whether it was studio demands or the absence of Jim Abrahms and Jerry Zucker, this third entry in the series leaned in hard on spoofing then-recent (and not-so-recent) cinema, including opening with a parody of the stairs sequence from The Untouchables, riffing on Thelma and Louise, and, strangely, Staying Alive ( but only in the most rudimentary ways).  Not satisfied with in-story (or in-dreams, or in-tangent) parodies, the film's final act takes place at the Academy Awards (the curious roster of celebrity cameos - like "Wierd" Al and Vanna White is very charming) where they have more opportunity to do out-of-story spoofs like "Geriatric Park". Divesting itself of classic detective and cop tropes and going into 90's crime thrillers and prison dramas along with xenophobic, gay panic, rape jokes and transphobia (in the guise of a Crying Game riff) is the series at its absolute lowest, but sequences that play like hack observational comedy (such as Frank's visit to the grocery store or Frank trying to talk to a cabbie) lay the foundation for this weakest entry in the series.

33 1/3 leaves behind the noirish tendencies, savvy wordplay and even the regular running gags to fit into the "movie riffing on other movies" trend that wouldn't subside for another couple decades. It's really disappointing. On top of that, the story doesn't have any character resonance. It opens with with Jane having become a busy lawyer with her biological clock ticking. Frank has retired and is bored. They want a baby but Jane's too busy and Frank's feeling neglected. The "domesticated man" comedy is dated, but Nielsen sells it pretty good. Ed and Nordberg need his help in a case, and he goes undercover at a sperm bank. After Jane discovers Frank is a cop again, she leaves him, so Frank dives headfirst into more undercover work, going into high security prison to befriend freelance bomber Rocco Dillon (Fred Ward). He helps him escape and Jane reenters the picture just as Rocco's girl Tanya (Anna Nicole Smith, who the film convinced 18-year-old Kent was the most beautiful woman in the world) inexplicably makes fresh with him (it must have been something in Nielsen's contract, as she does it again and again in the film). Rocco's plan is to bomb the Academy Awards, and through various shenanigans (some of them actually amusing) Frank stops them.

It's Frank and Jane's relationship in the first two movies that works so well at its core. The smartest thing the second film did was open with them broken up just so it had an excuse to put Jane with yet another foil for Frank and then bring them together again. Here, the break-up feels contrived and doesn't seem to carry a lot of weight on Frank for the remainder of the film. Jane's return to the fold at the end of the second act is handle well enough to bring her back into the picture, but it's just so she can be the damsel in distress again (though pointedly so, if not quite pointedly enough).  There was an opportunity here to establish a formulae for the series itself, with Frank and Jane starting each film broken up again already, and to continue to abuse Nordberg (which this third entry mostly neglects)... but the series would not continue anyway due to diminishing returns... that is until 2025.

This new iteration of The Naked Gun was resurrected by writer/director Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island), co-writers Dan Gregor & Doug Mand, and producers Seth McFarlane and Erica Huggins, and it falls squarely into the "legasequel" terrain. Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. while Paul Walter Houser plays the Junior version of George Kennedy's Captain Ed Hocken. Where the Senior Ed was the man in charge of Police Squad in the original series, here both Frank and Ed report into their Chief, played by CCH Pounder.

It's been 30 years since the last Naked Gun film so there's a LOT of cops and detective fiction and non-fiction in the intervening years, and the awareness of police abuses and corruption is much more in the consciousness, so a modern day spoof on the genre has plenty to play with. The film opens with a Christopher Nolan-styled bank robbery sequence that featured prominently in the trailers. Neeson, like Nielsen, is shameless in his comedy guise and had no compunction about doing an action sequences wearing a schoolgirl uniform. Like the original series, this downplays the violence, despite noting how frequently Frank likes to shoot perps (offscreen gun violence is something he shares with his father apparently).

The robbery was a smokescreen for the theft of the P.L.O.T. device, which is handed off to billionaire tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston). His plan is a big modern supervillain grand scheme...to send a signal that will drive the world into a primordial rage, while all the rich shits go live in a secret volcano bunker with "Weird" Al and wait out humanity's self destruction.

As a result of his egregious abuse of his police powers, Frank is booted off the robbery case, and onto investigating an auto wreck. The victim's sister, Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, which this film reminded me that 14-year-old Kent was convinced she was the most beautiful woman in the world) advises Frank her brother worked for Cane and so the storylines dovetail. Unlike Frank Sr. and Jane, their flirtation is filled with more disdain than attraction, which softens slightly with each subsequent encounter. Beth is much more a woman of action...as a true crime author (based on stories she's made up) she figures she can follow the cliched path of investigating her brother's death and exact her revenge. Only Frank Jr. stands in her way. Unlike its predecessor, and in modern action movie fashion, Frank fails to stop the evil plan, and then has to deal with the fallout. I never could have predicted where it would go, not in a mil...not in a doz... not in, say, seven guesses.

The film is loaded with sight gags, non-sequiturs, wordplay, etc... all the hallmarks of a Naked Gun movie, and its approach to parody is more in line with the first film of the original trilogy, rather than the third. Shaffer opts for stylistic parody rather than direct scene-for-scene or lampooning. He adopts the tone of Tony Scott or a David Fincher when the need serves him, but adopting such sensibilities does bump up against the comedic sensibilities at times. 

There's some of The Lonely Island's trademark pop-culture riffing, with an 80-styled montage of Frank Jr. and Beth, whisking away to a log cabin and having sexy times, but quickly turning weird when they build a snowman, practice witchcraft and bring the snowman to life...and it just gets weirder from there. It's mashing so many references and genres together, it made my brain spin, and yes, I loved it. 

On a joke density level, it's pretty high, especially for a modern comedy released in cinemas (ha... what's that?) but its still not to the level of the original Naked Gun... but I say this with only one viewing. Part of what makes the original so fantastic is familiarity, having watched it dozens of times so as to have seen every joke it has to offer. I have to wonder/hope this version has more in store than upon first watch.

As said, Neeson is game. He's not been shy about dispelling his on-screen image, from A Million Days to Die in the West to The Lego Batman Movie to a cameo in Donald Glover's Atlanta, it's clear the man has a sense of humour and is more than aware of his on-screen persona to subvert it.  After seeing Paul Walter Houser steal his main scene in Fantastic Four: First Steps, I was hoping he would have a bigger spotlight here, but as Ed Jr. he gets about as much screen time as George Kennedy would, but his presence is still enjoyably welcome. Pamela Anderson's comeback career trucks on, after The Last Showgirl showed everyone (who watch it...it's on my list) that she has real-deal acting chops, here she's able to spotlight her comedic sensibilities once again, and all you need is "Sassafras Chicken in D" to tell you she's got the goods. It's hard to think who the modern Ricardo Montalbon or Robert Goulet, because Hollywood doesn't really produce these kind of personalities anymore... and Danny Huston is far too good and capable an actor to be considered in their league, but he does a really good job, culminating in that amazing final showdown with Neeson in the end.

The biggest letdown of this new film is it didn't feature the patented Naked Gun opening title sequence with James Ira Newborn's rollicking, swinging, horn wail of an theme playing over scenes of a police siren wailing while it intones a cop car driving through ludicrous situations (it does play the theme during the end credits and reedits the opening sequences from the original trilogy, which seems a poor concession). That said, the title card of the film does have a good gag, and there are jokes scattered throughout the end credits.

Will The Naked Gun revive comedies on the big screen, or, will it just revive more parody movies (in which case, God help us all)?

One final note, I took my kids (16 and 23) to see the film, and it played well for my eldest who is kind of obsessed with procedurals and detective stories, but my teen hasn't really ever engaged with the genre and found only a few scenes really amusing. This generation of kids who experience most of culture through youtube videos and tiktoks of other people talking about culture makes this kind of spoofing and satirizing difficult, because the kids don't have the cinematic language for it. Or maybe that's just my kid.