When, way back in 1982, Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers launched Police Squad! – TV forerunner of the Naked Gun films – the cop shows being parodied were already drifting out of fashion. Those pompous episode titles and woody performances were riffing on Quinn Martin series from the previous decade (and farther back than that).
A malcontent in the 21st century might reasonably wonder what possible sense a “legacy sequel” could still have. “They don’t make cop movies any more,” a Zucker brother said not so long ago. “When you do parody, you’ve got to spoof something current.” You may as well launch a comedy aping the conventions of medieval mystery plays. Right?
Akiva Schaffer, director and co-writer of the first Naked Gun film for more than 30 years, has taken some of those arguments on board. You will detect a few riffs on Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible adventures. There are (obviously) a few more on Liam Neeson’s recent run of revenge thrillers. Contemporary pop culture works its way in. But the new film essentially works within the old structures.
Neeson, as Frank Drebin jnr, son of Leslie Nielsen’s original dumb copper, still works at an old-school Los Angeles precinct with grumpy men in lounge suits. The films seems to think “content creators” still deliver mystery dramas in which officers stand off against evil geniuses in southern-California mansions.
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None of that matters. It never did. The same team’s Airplane! still plays well with audiences whose parents were barely sentient during the 1970s disaster-movie boom. The Naked Gun was a joke-delivery system whose allusions to Cannon and The Streets of San Francisco were mere decoration. The current Naked Gun has its flaws, but none of them stems from anachronism.
It is at its best when playing with the original series’ deadpan linguistic misunderstandings. “You can’t fight City Hall,” the set-up comes. “No ... it’s a building,” comes the reply. As before, the character delivering the feed doesn’t point out that wasn’t quite what he meant. The conversation carries on as if that was what he meant.
The supporting cast are all on board with this conceit. Pamela Anderson, still enjoying her deserved renaissance, accommodates the straightest of faces to a noirish simmer. Danny Huston is equally strong as an evil billionaire who doesn’t believe anyone so dumb as Drebin can thwart his plans. CCH Pounder does good angry boss. Paul Walter Hauser is an ideal sidekick.
Neeson himself is more of a quandary. He’s never bad. He doesn’t kill the joke. But it does feel as if too much acting’s going on. Somewhere in here there’s a line about being “the same as you but completely different and original”. It is, unfortunately, impossible to watch a second of Neeson without considering Nielsen’s heroic blankness. Our man looks to be making the unfortunate, though not fatal, mistake of trying to make sense of every line. Drebin jnr is thinking things through. His dad allowed no such complicating process.
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That reservation aside, it must be admitted that, against the odds, the team do a largely satisfactory job of reanimating the corpse. I’m not sure audiences will have quite as much fun watching the thing as the writers plainly had getting it on to the page. But they have certainly stuck to the brief with admirable diligence. The inevitable backward-looking cameos are kept to a bare minimum. Nobody expects you to follow the preposterous plot. Some of the funniest jokes are held for an extended end-credit sequence that expands brilliantly on a solid recurring gag from the original series.
We deserve some big dumb fun. We always do.
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In cinemas from Friday, August 1st
