Directed by Akiva Schaffer | Written by Schaffer, Dan Gregor, and Doug Mand, based on the TV series Police Squad, by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker | ▲1/2
Hollywood is excited by this late-arriving sequel/reboot because mainstream, broad comedy has been a non-starter on the big screen for years. Even the sequel to Happy Gilmore, a huge hit back in the day, went to Netflix last week. But the hype around this return to the big, dumb humour of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team — who made their names with both the Airplane and Naked Gun franchises in the ’80s — is aimed at getting audiences to go have a laugh in theatres again.
As a replacement for the legendary Canadian leading man Leslie Neilsen, they’ve cast Liam Neeson, the Irish actor who’s made a career since 2008 in increasingly indistinguishable action crap. I’ve seen a few of them — the abysmal Blacklight, the noir pastiche Marlow, and those examples of bad parenting, the Taken movies. In among that stuff are a few decent genre pictures, like Run All Night and A Walk Among The Tombstones, and every once in awhile Neeson reminds us he has other gears, like in Ordinary Love and Wildcat.
At 73, this might be the right time for him to make fun of that tough guy image he’s worked so hard to cultivate. Here he’s the son of the Leslie Neilsen character, Frank Drebin, and like dad he’s part of Police Squad, a special branch of the LAPD.
Cue a lot of goofy slapstick and visual gags, a lot of dumb wordplay, and not a little scatological and sexual humour, too, all of the most base and lowest-common-denominator variety. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as those ZAZ pictures from the 1980s proved. So why does this effort manage to fall so flat?
Partly it’s the rate of the jokes — the original Naked Gun barely gave you time to breathe with the number of gags coming at you. There are plenty of jokes here, but they’re not sharp, regular, or original enough, with the hit rate about one in 7. Neeson keeps a straight face, but there’s something not quite right in his line delivery — Neeson is a dramatic actor with nuance and a gritty presence, while Neilson was often stiff and old-fashioned in his dramatic work, the product of an earlier generation of acting. Ironically, that made him a terrific straight man, like he stepped out of the ’40s and ’50s. And Neeson doesn’t get nearly enough help from the script.
The baddie here is a tech billionaire (oh, hi Danny Huston) making electric, self-driving cars and looking to destroy America — very timely, that — and in support we get a game Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, CCH Pounder, and Kevin Durand, who all do a decent job to keep this thing moving.
But this new Naked Gun never escapes feeling like an anachronism, and a big part of that is it’s working hard to spoof detective and cop show tropes that were stale 30 years ago. Those shows just that aren’t popular anymore, so this can’t help but feel out of date — even while they slap around Elon Musk in the villainy stakes.
With all those bad action movies in Neeson’s wake, why wouldn’t the filmmakers work harder to satirize his special set of skills? There’s a chance here to make fun of a broader variety of pictures, but they don’t go there. I recognize the reviews for this picture are glowing, and there’s nothing more subjective than comedy — but this is, for the most part, just not funny.
