Spoof comedy is incredibly hard to get right in large part because one must be incredibly smart to write it.  It sounds counterintuitive, but some of the dumbest jokes you can think of require razor-sharp instincts and wit, and those things don’t grow on trees.  It’s not just that fart jokes require excellent timing; Wordplay needs to be clever but feel organic. Sight gags take a ton of planning, and need someone who is willing to deliver all of that and look ridiculous doing it.  

Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker were the undisputed masters of this form.  In the 1980s, they made three spoof masterpieces: Airplane!, Top Secret! And The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! They combined the lowest common denominator with stunning wordplay, clever sight gags, and a love of exclaimation points.  They had recurring jokes that could make you laugh each time, even when repeated nearly verbatim, and this balance is so well maintained that these movies remain incredibly funny (if a little dated) to this day.  They also cast dramatic actors to deliver ridiculous lines completely deadpan, and changed the direction of Leslie Nielsen’s career entirely.  

With legacy sequels and existing IP being so popular today, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to recapture that magic. Luckily for us, after three decades of pale imitations, producer Seth McFarlane and director Akiva Schaffer have delivered the goods with The Naked Gun, a ridiculous spoof comedy that is as smart as it is dumb, and stars a dramatic actor to deliver ridiculous lines completely deadpan. This new The Naked Gun isn’t just a good spoof comedy, it’s a great one. 

Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr, a Detective Lieutenant in Police Squad, a special division of the LAPD.  At the start of the film, there are two crimes: the suspicious death of a man who seemingly committed suicide, and a bank heist in which an experimental P.L.O.T. Device is stolen.  Yes, you read that correctly. No, this is not a serious movie.  In the film’s opening scene, Neeson takes out the entire gang of thieves dressed in a little girl’s plaid skirt and sweater, using a lollipop as a deadly weapon.  Soon, he’s investigating Danny Huston’s megalomaniacal tech billionaire character, who owns an electric car company.  He also has to deal with a femme fatale played by Pamela Anderson.

The plot draws inspiration from various sources, not just police procedurals, but also film franchises such as James Bond, Mission: Impossible, and Kingsman. It’s a little over the top, but that’s the kind of movie this is, and while that may all sound like a recipe for a disaster, in the hands of McFarlane, Schaffer, and Neeson, it actually lands as perhaps the funniest film of the year.

The genius move here is hiring Neeson for the title role.  Like Nielsen before him, he is a dramatic actor, and also like Nielsen, he is apparently willing to do just about anything for a laugh.  Sometimes this will mean an extended poop joke, and others it will be some of the cleverest wordplay you’re likely to hear this year, and Neeson nails it all.  Similarly, Pamela Anderson is fantastic, matching Neeson’s energy and willingness to take risks every time, and at the same time, has so much chemistry with Neeson that you could bottle the excess and make a tidy profit.  That’s really the key here – for a film like this to succeed, the performers need to be willing to look silly and act serious doing it, and both Neeson and Anderson really go for it. 

To put it another way, The Naked Gun is the first film in at least thirty years to recapture the Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker magic.  It’s occasionally crass, frequently clever, entirely unsubtle, incredibly juvenile, and profoundly dumb, all in the best way imaginable.  It’s the kind of movie where if a joke doesn’t land for you, that’s fine because you can simply wait ten seconds for the next one, and the kind of movie that will leave your face sore from laughing so much. It has all the hallmarks of the originals, but most especially their their sense of humour.  It has some of the best wordplay, an all-time cop joke, and a couple of moments so dark that you won’t believe they actually both went there and pulled it off.  

In short, The Naked Gun is one of the –if not the– funniest, dumbest, cleverest movies of the year so far.  

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