Year of Release: 2025
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Liza Koshy, Eddie Yu, Michael Beasley, Moses Jones, Chase Steven Anderson, Cody Rhodes, Busta Rhymes
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 6
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Synopsis and Review
Writer, producer, director Akiva Schaffer, has a long career in comedy, including long writing stints with Saturday Night Live, and with the occasional foray into feature films, including the Andy Samberg vehicle "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping". Schaffer, alongside Doug Mand, and Dan Gregor have tackled the original concept from the ZAZ creative team in revisiting "The Naked Gun", which was originally an extension of the cancelled TV Show "Police Squad", which featured the now iconic duo of Leslie Nielsen and George Kennedy (with the support of Priscilla Presley in the feature films). This new version of "The Naked Gun" follows the story of Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. of the LAPD Police Squad, whom we first encounter tackling an armed robbery on a bank. However, this isn't your typical robbery - in reality the robbery is a decoy for the real goal of the assault: stealing a gadget named "PLOT Device" from a safe deposit box. Drebin's intervention gets him in trouble with his boss, who reassigns him to another case, a fatal car crash whose victim was a software engineer named Simon Davenport. The deceased's sister, Beth, a crime novelist, communicates with Drebin and indicates she thinks her brother was killed. As Drebin starts investigating, the leads start pointing in the direction of the billionaire Richard Cane, who has some nefarious plans he intends to set in motion with the "PLOT Device" gadget.
What was always a staple for the ZAZ authored feature films and their sole TV series, was their ability to mine the seriousness of different genres, particularly the police story/thriller genres, and introduce the nonsense within the parameters/tropes of that genre, asking their actors to perform all events as if though they were indeed in a dramatic situation. They applied this concept to "Airplane", but also "Top Secret" (the WWII genre), "The Naked Gun", and as they went in separate directions, they leveraged different sources to reference in their output, namely military films of the 80s for inspiration on "Hot Shots" and in the early 2000s, horror/suspense films with their take on "Scary Movie". Akiva Schaffer and his creative team do quite well with the assignment, in this modernized take on "The Naked Gun". Gone are indeed the winks to films and TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s (while Danny Huston is a wondrous actor, one can't help but miss the stupendous Ricardo Montalban or Robert Goulet as the main villains), but the film introduces funny takes and jabs on modern cultural references, including the ever present coffee drink, electric cars, and the omnipresent technology. This creative team however doesn't quite know what to do with the supporting characters, something that the original films solved a lot better, placing George Kennedy and Priscilla Presley always in the right hilarious moments (and the romantic and sex scene montages between Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in the original films were themselves ridiculous and superlatively funny). There are aspects this film could have lived without, namely the bodily functions humor, but Liam Neeson fully commits to the role, at times bringing to mind his role in Sam Raimi's "Darkman", but his seriousness in the embodiment of Drebin Jr. and his easy rapport with Pamela Anderson, all entwined with the silliness of the situations themselves, keep the laughs coming. It's a nicely crafted successor to the original films, even if it doesn't reach the tone, including the lunacy, of the original. Worth watching.
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