It’s hard to beat seeing a genuinely great comedy in a theater. The raucous laughter, the kinetic movement within the theater, looking at an actor’s giant face on that huge movie screen as they deliver a great joke, feeling the percussive downbeat following a great gag resonating in your bones as it emanates out of the speaker system. Great comedies were meant to be seen with an audience, and Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is a film that understands this on a fundamental level.
Not only is The Naked Gun literally doing this, becoming one of the few big-budget studio comedies to be released in theaters over the last several years (and pretty much the only one that is this outright lunacy-filled), but it’s also been crafted so as to play to a packed house. This is a film that revels in hitting the audience with a new joke just as the wave of the last gag begins to crest. It’s a hat on top of a hat on top of a hat, at all times and never lets up for even a second, making for one of the single greatest in-theater experiences I’ve ever had with a comedy.
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TOP 5 THINGS ABOUT “THE NAKED GUN”
5. Hark, A Comedy!
Why are there no more theatrical comedies? The average loser excuse has to do with PC culture and wokeness, but none of that has the faintest shred of legitimacy to it. Rather, the reason comedies aren’t made on that level anymore is that Hollywood conditioned audiences not to go to them. As streaming platforms became popularized across the 2010s, studios gradually began outsourcing their feature comedy films to these online outlets. But in doing this en masse, the studios essentially were telling audiences, time and again, that comedy was a genre best served via streaming.
Obviously, that isn’t true, but when it’s reiterated over and over, people start to buy into it. The Naked Gun gleefully and irreverently blasts this notion to bits within its opening moments: not only is it a theatrically-released comedy, it’s a big, ridiculous, entirely absurd film on every level.
4. Lorne Balfe’s Score
Renowned composer Lorne Balfe, who has brought such wondrous emotion and authenticity in his work to the last several Mission: Impossible films, taps in here and delivers a fantastic musical score for an extremely silly movie. The Naked Gun itself is a decades-old property, with this new film being inspired by the original 1988 film, directed by David Zucker and starring the iconic Leslie Nielsen. The genius of Nielsen’s performance in those original films was the way in which he could deliver even the most obscene of lines with a completely steadfast deadpan style, and Balfe echoes that in his approach to the music here.
There’s nothing funny about the music in The Naked Gun, as Balfe interweaves flourishes of the classic score with newer sonic textures, more directly indebted to his own work on modern action films. And yet, through playing it so earnest and straight, Balfe’s score makes the gags all the better.
3. The Cast
The Naked Gun cast is delightfully filled to the brim with unexpected swerves in terms of casting, and they all pay off in spades. Powerhouse dramatic actor Danny Huston, the son of the legendary John Huston? Turns out he’s a pitch-perfect manosphere-inspired antagonist for the new Frank Drebin. Emmy-winning actor Paul Walter Hauser? His remarkable comedic timing and chops are on full display as Drebin’s crime-fighting partner. And most wonderfully of all, Pamela Anderson (who was great in the recent The Last Showgirl) nearly steals the whole movie as the femme fatale who goes tit-for-tat with Neeson’s lead detective. Her role is simultaneously an inspired riff on the noir trope, modern true crime archetypes, and absolutely ridiculous. She plays it with aplomb and delivers what is probably the best performance of her entire career in the process.
Also, there’s a whole host of inspired cameo appearances, each of which is funnier than the last.
2. Liam Neeson
The lead actor gets a space all his own on the list, simply by virtue of how utterly unbelievable he is. Leslie Nielsen was not only an incredibly gifted comedic actor but a fantastic performer in his own right. To step into his shoes is an inenviable task, and one that I would have told you was outright unfeasible up until very recently. But from the moment I saw Neeson in the role, going all-in on the most deadpan delivery he could, infusing elements of Nielsen’s iconic performance with a send-up of his own renowned leading action hero capabilities, I knew I was in the presence of a righteous choice.
It is impossible to overstate how wonderful Neeson is in the role. From the metatextual way he is able to dress down modern action clichés from his unique vantage point within the genre, to his balls-to-the-wall commitment to even the film’s most heightened absurdist moments, Neeson pulls off the impossible here.
1. Akiva Schaffer’s Unflinching Dedication to the Bit
Writer-director Akvia Schaffer has made a career out of doing the impossible. Having made films such as Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and the grossly underappreciated Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers (as well as continuing to serve as a founding member of comedy troupe The Lonely Island), Schaffer specializes a kind of modernized lunacy that has always been clearly inspired by the works of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, the filmmakers behind The Naked Gun, Airplane!, and Top Secret.
In this new film, Schaffer manages to deliver an irreverent love letter to those inspirations, while also carving out a path that is distinctly new. While the comedic sensibilities of the film are highly classical, down to the direction and implementation of visual gags, the material itself is decidedly fresh and new. The Naked Gun skewers everything from modern politics to legacy sequel culture itself, with razor-sharp precision and gut-busting hysterics.
RGM GRADE
(A)
I couldn’t have loved The Naked Gun more than I did. As someone who is a huge fan of the original films and the kind of high-octane lunacy-driven humor they operate on, The Naked Gun felt like witnessing a bona fide miracle happening before my eyes. God bless us all.
