The Naked Gun (2025)

 The Naked Gun re-boots a comedy franchise of the same name that expired about thirty years ago.  The picture is quite funny.  I saw it in a movie theater, primarily so I could gage the reactions of the audience.  (It's notoriously hard to assess comedy if you watch it by yourself on TV.)  The audience, mostly comprised of retired people -- I attended a matinee on a Friday -- laughed heartily at many of the film's gags and seemed to appreciate the movie.  (In the theater where I saw the picture, overly aggressive employees flipped on the lights and began cleaning the auditorium before the end of the credits, pressuring customers to leave the theater -- this was unfortunate because the picture comes equipped with post-credits sequence that I didn't see; there were a number of jokes spliced into the closing credits and people shouldn't be hurried out of the theater with regard to a film of this sort.)  The movie is throw-back to pictures like the original Naked Gun with Leslie Nielsen and the Airport franchise with Robert Stack -- these movies are parodies of genre films (buddy-cop police procedurals and disaster-in-the-air pictures respectively) and they are constructed on the basis of a vestigial plot that is merely a scaffold on which to assemble as many gags as possible -- many of them either sight gags or verbal humor based on puns and misunderstandings.  (In The Naked Gun, Liam Neeson as Detective Frank Drebin Jr. tells Pamela Anderson playing the femme fatale Beth Davenport to "take a chair" meaning "sit down"; instead, she picks up a chair and drags it out of the station house when she leaves in a huff knocking people over, spilling files on the floor, and causing generous amounts of mayhem.)  The movie is self-aware, winking broadly at the audience -- in the final credits scene, Drebin and Davenport discover they are being surveilled by the camera and the hero literally punches his way through the screen,  I would estimate that about 25% of the gags "landed", the rest failing in one way or another -- but a ratio of one good joke to four stinkers is pretty good.  The frame is crowded with all sorts of business with sight-gags layered all the way from foreground to the back of the shot -- the effect is like a Mad Magazine movie parody. The jokes and word-play come so fast that it's hard to keep track of it -- the movie has an antic quality that makes it rather exhausting to watch.  I recall that the greatest silent comedies generally were made as two-reelers which seems to me to be about the length of time that, even, an attentive audience can sustain jokes of this kind.  After awhile, the hilarity runs thin and the scenario keeps repeating the same gags.  One running motif is that disembodied off-screen hands keep reaching into the frame to hand Drebin and his side-kick cups of coffee -- this occurs even when Drebin is driving at high speed or being carried through the air by an owl.  In one sequence, Drebin sees the silhouette of an outrageously voluptuous dame through a semi-opaque window -- when he opens the door, the figure is revealed to be just a collection of hats and gloves and jackets arranged on a coatrack.  In one of the funniest scenes, this gag is repeated:  a crook who is watching Drebin with Beth Davenport (the cop's romantic interest in the movie) sees them performing all sorts of outrageous sex acts including a threesome with a big dog; however, the hood is watching shadows on a curtain and we can see that what is really happening in the room is nothing like it looks on screen.  There are about four or five sex acts deceptively displayed in this way as well as the silhouette of the broad in the early scene -- it's ingenious and funny but the inspiration of the writers seems to be waning a bit.  

The film's premise is that a master-criminal (played by Danny Huston with a scar that keeps migrating from cheek to cheek -- an effect stolen from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein in which Eyegor's hump keeps moving from one shoulder to another) has stolen a sort of TV remote control labeled "P.L.O.T. Device" -- this thing, when activated, causes people to revert to their primitive and savage instincts, stirring up mass chaos and slaughter.  (Comedy has a very conservative vision of human nature).  The device was invented or programmed or something by Beth Davenport's husband who was murdered by manipulation of a self-driving car -- it was piloted off a cliff into a quarry.  Frank Drebin has busted-up the bank robbery in which an army of armed men have stolen the P.L,O,T, device from a safe deposit  box.  Drebin is always in trouble with his feisty Black female boss -- he's a typical "rogue cop", a sort of "Dirty Harry."  She takes him off the investigation of the bank heist and assigns him work on the supposed suicide of the programmer, who was Beth Davenport's  husband.  Beth Davenport is extravagantly sexy and seduces Frank.  (They have a sex scene with an animated snow man -- a sort of Frosty the Snowman menage a trois).  The two investigations collide, coalesce, and the movie turns into a James Bond-style battle between the mad scientist villain and Frank Drebin.  There's some scatological humor involving diarrhea and Drebin's body-cam (that he has been ordered to deploy and keep running) and, at one point, an owl assails a fleeing bad man with owl feces.  There are enough clever bits to keep the audience's attention up to the end of the movie which is about 82 minutes long.  Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr. (Lesley Nielsen was the original Frank Drebin) is very funny in a gruff discombobulated way and he gets one of the best entrances in film history.  Pam Anderson is both sexy and ridiculous.  The part of Drebin's side-kick, Ed Hocken (the son of Ed Hocken, Sr. played in the original film by George Kennedy) is grossly underwritten and the character really has little or nothing to do.  There is a funny O. J. Simpson gag --  the football player was in both the original Naked Gun and the Airport pictures.  Naked Gun (2025) was directed by Akiva Schaffer and it's an amusing diversion.  I recommend it.