\n<\/p>\n
Forgive me for saying this, but Liam Neeson has been in a few very silly movies. I refer not to the actual comedies he\u2019s popped up in but to the legion of action films he\u2019s churned out nonstop over the past 20 years\u2014each seemingly more perfunctory and high-concept than the last. The actor has growled melodramatic lines, brandished a gun, and dealt with assorted faceless bad guys in an airplane and in an ice-road truck, and even while trapped inside a parked car. His on-screen tough-guy persona is so ubiquitous and over-the-top that in the new comedy The Naked Gun, it barely requires any calibration to be funny.<\/p>\n
The original Naked Gun films, as well as the TV show, Police Squad!, that inspired them, were rooted in the same comedic spin. They starred Leslie Nielsen, who was known as a dramatic actor before his turn in the film Airplane! established him as a master of spoof comedy. Nielsen played the bumbling LAPD lieutenant Frank Drebin with sincerity, making the absurdity around him all the funnier. Neeson makes sense as Nielsen\u2019s successor: the stone-faced hero squinting at the silliest stuff imaginable.<\/p>\n
The goofiness of 2025\u2019s The Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer, is especially enjoyable in the current cinematic landscape. Amid the typical clamor of summer blockbusters, an out-and-out farce is like an oasis in the desert. Comedies used to be a major part of the moviegoing world, and I continue to be baffled that films filled with ridiculous gags and one-liners are almost impossible to find in theaters these days. Laughing along with a crowd is a beautiful, irreproducible experience, yet Hollywood seems to have shifted its priorities toward pumping out action-adventure movies\u2014a genre hardly known for its humor.<\/p>\n
Although not quite as transcendent as its forebears, the new Naked Gun manages to provide the inane fun I\u2019ve been missing. The action-inflected comedy keeps the ensemble tight: Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr.\u2014a macho, trigger-happy presence on the force who\u2019s never without a cup of coffee. (An off-screen figure even passes one to him through his car window while he\u2019s driving on the freeway.) The supporting cast includes the well-meaning Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (played by an affably dim Paul Walter Hauser), the grumpy Chief Davis (CCH Pounder), and a femme-fatale type named Beth (Pamela Anderson), who enters Drebin\u2019s world to request that he investigate her brother\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
The movie judders from one set piece to another with only a loose plot to follow\u2014the story involves some dead bodies, an evil billionaire (Danny Huston), and a budding romance between Drebin and Beth. Everyone plays it reliably straight, a contrast that helps the film maintain its zany energy\u2014and, in the spirit of the original trilogy, maximize the number of jokes per minute. If one bit flops, another arrives in a few seconds to make up for it.<\/p>\n
The Naked Gun\u2019s commitment to that airy sense of pointlessness is refreshing. Schaffer\u2019s most notable long-form work to date is probably Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a scrappy collaboration with his friends and former Saturday Night Live collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, a.k.a. the Lonely Island; the movie skewered music biopics with cheerful, vulgar aplomb. Popstar was largely ignored by most theatergoers, but it became a near-instant cult classic among comedy diehards. Now Schaffer is trying to sneak the same high-grade, unadulterated fun into a major motion picture, with a steely Neeson as its guise. By attaching his farce to the face of some of Hollywood\u2019s biggest action movies, the director is gambling that it will draw a wider audience.<\/p>\n
The world needs more comedies, and the sillier the better. The Naked Gun is happy to deliver plenty of chortles, along with some wild swings that are just slapsticky enough to work. (A sequence featuring a sentient snowman defies easy description.) I\u2019m rooting for its success in the hope that it brings some genre diversity to the silver screen\u2014not just action movies with jokes, but action movies that are a joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Forgive me for saying this, but Liam Neeson has been in a few very silly movies. I refer not to the actual comedies he\u2019s popped up in but to the legion of action films he\u2019s churned out nonstop over the past 20 years\u2014each seemingly more perfunctory and high-concept than the last. The actor has growled<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2512,997,7181,5825,7182,1119],"class_list":{"0":"post-13504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-comedy","9":"tag-gun","10":"tag-liam","11":"tag-naked","12":"tag-neeson","13":"tag-save"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}