Dressed for Fun

The Naked Gun is a legacy sequel to the mad cap comedy franchise of the late 80's/ early 90's, with Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the legendary Leslie Neilson's detective from the original movies. Is big Liam quite as good at deadpan hilarity as Neilson was? Possibly not. Does this film ever completely match the highs of its predecessors? Probably not. Is it still very funny? Absolutely.

The film arrives amid a cinematic landscape devoid of out of and out comedies, with laughs mostly relegated to one liners in action films or the silly sidekick in a romcom. Fortunately, from the moment a Girl Scout peels off her face to reveal a gurning Neilson, right through to a joke filled credits roll, The Naked Gun is interested solely in making you chuckle. Sure, there is a plot, involving a mcguffin literally named PLOT device and an evil tech mogul, played with deliciously deadpan malice by Danny Huston, but it's all about the gags. The comedy runs the gamut from toilet humour to a music video style cut away involving a demonic snowman, so its unlikely all the bits will land for any one particular person but the odd clanger scarcely matters when the next joke is only ever seconds away. It's only after experiencing it you realise how rare it is for a modern movie to coax you into the laughter zone and just leave you there for the entire runtime.

Everyone on screen looks like they are having an appropriately riotous time, even while playing everything completely straight in the Naked Gun tradition. Neeson has comedy chops and brilliantly applies them to the kind of gruff, no nonsense action man persona he has been specialising in for the last decade and a half. Huston is also playing very much in type, giving his sinister string puller persona just enough of a comedic twist to sit perfectly in this world of farce. Pamela Anderson brings the exact right blend of sultry, shady and stupid as femme fatale Beth Davenport and continues to show how much Hollywood dropped the ball with her back in the day. We get a range of cameos, most of which work pretty well.

With projects like 2016's mockumentary "Poster : Never Stop Never Stopping" and 2022's under seen "Chip 'n Dale : Rescue Rangers", director Avika Schaffer is doing his bit to keep funny films alive and this effort may cement him as the new king of smartly stupid comedy. Not every single one of the raid fire jokes land but plenty do and it's hard to imagine the person so stone faced they wouldn't at least crack a smile during the runtime. The fact that said runtime is a super trim eighty five minutes is a bonus.

7 slaps from a dismembered arm out of 10

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