Film Review - The Naked Gun
Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures Australia.
The last time I recall seeing Liam Neeson in a comedic role was a few years ago, in an unhailed cameo in the third season of Donald Glover’s often-surrealist series Atlanta. Playing himself in a plotline that pokes fun at a real-life racism scandal of his, Neeson is characteristically gruff and plain-spoken. The scene is funny, but more from the shock: more from folding around his existing persona than from anything he’s doing in his performance.
Neeson’s star turn in this week’s new The Naked Gun film, on the other hand, is outrageously silly. As Frank Drebin Junior, son of the Frank Drebin who led the original Naked Gun and its two sequels in the late 80s and early 90s, he embodies the same madcap buffoonery as Leslie Nielsen’s iconic original performance. Like his father in the first films, Frank Drebin Junior also often narrates the story in a loose parody of a moody film noir voice-over – and like in those films, the actual ‘storyline’ that he’s keeping us up with barely matters.
Any semblance of narrative or stakes is, delightfully, simply a means to an end here – and that ‘end’ is just more jokes. For example, director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (one-third of comedy song trio The Lonely Island, and a great fit for this long-dormant franchise) really tips his hand when a character announces that the bad guys have stolen a dangerous piece of technology: a “P.L.O.T. Device”. Everything comes back to the comedic sensibility: the film is remarkably dedicated to its gag-per-minute ratio, as all logic, internal consistency, and characterisation are routinely compromised in favour of a punchline. Not every gag lands, but the sheer amount of them is what makes the film such a winning experience – eventually they’ll get you. I haven’t seen anything like it since the work of Leslie Nielsen in either the originals or the classic Flying High, or Mel Brooks’ parodies like Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs.
Of course, for an approach like this to work, the performers have to be prepared to go all-in on it: they have to be as goofy as the film itself, and this is perhaps the more impressive achievement in the contemporary Hollywood landscape. Neeson is constantly the butt of jokes, consistently undermining his own on-screen persona (the intimidating, stoic action hero of Taken, Ice Road, The Commuter and countless other genre flicks), and mining gold from the dissonance between his character’s idiocy and self-seriousness. Pamela Anderson as the femme-fatale figure is also impressively game: the 90s sex symbol goes all-out on the silliness, another really great use of an actor’s relationship to the audience. And Danny Huston as the villain got maybe the hardest laughs out of me – the guy has one of the most unique voices in Hollywood, and his Elon-Musk-esque billionaire character gets some incredibly, perfectly stupid lines that he elevates with aplomb (I keep thinking back to a confrontation between him and Neeson’s hero Drebin that becomes about The Black Eyed Peas, and the original title of their 2003 hit Let’s Get it Started…).
The comedy here is creative, too: it’s not all through dialogue – a great visual gag involves the view from a pair of night-vision goggles – and the film often derails itself for high-concept extended bits, like a romantic montage that takes a surprising turn, or a sequence showing Drebin’s bodycam footage over the course of a day, or a direct reference to 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
The weakness in a film like this, it turns out, is just how long it can be sustained: it’s an under-90-minute film – which is the right choice – but even then, the relentless onslaught of silly jokes can wear on you by the time you get an hour-plus in. I find that’s just the limits of such an out-and-out comedy, and I don’t think the film could realistically get around them. Such a commitment is so rare, though, and so this new The Naked Gun is something worth being grateful for. It’s odd to plant a flag on something so ridiculous, so frivolous, and say ‘this is special and great’ – but every laugh in this film had to be thought up, committed to rather than dismissed for being silly, and executed just right. It’s special, and it’s great.
The Naked Gun is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.