Wonderfully ludicrous
Summary
The Naked Gun is at times laugh out loud hilarious with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson on fine comedic form, but the film has a few fight scenes and there are genuine stakes in between the silliness. Seeing it with an audience was a blast as it was just nice to hear people laughing again.
Plot: Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr becomes a police officer like his legendary father and must save the police department from shutting down by solving a case.
Review: I normally see new movies opening night, but life has been too busy for a while and I’m a bit late to see Liam Neeson’s reboot/legacy sequel for The Naked Gun. I was prepared to wait for streaming for this, but decided a comedy is best enjoyed with an audience.
I was not wrong as watching this movie tonight was a bit of a tonic where I really enjoyed hearing a movie audience laughing again. It’s been a while since we had a good action comedy, and The Naked Gun was far funnier than I expected. There were several scenes where my brother and I were in hysterics, and it just caught us in the right mood.
Liam Neeson is perfect as Frank Drebin Jr. where he plays it all totally straight which is the best way to do comedy. I don’t know how they manage to do it as I was cracking up at several points. Neeson is known for his more serious action hero roles, so it was nice to see him poke fun at it.
*Spoilers ahead* This actually has a coherent story where our villain Richard Cane (Danny Houston) wants to use his P.L.O.T. Device to drive people crazy, so only a select few people will be left to restart civilization. It’s up to Frank and his new love interest Beth (Pamela Anderson) to stop him.
The Naked Gun manages to be funny right from the start and for the most part maintains the momentum which is hard for any comedy to do. Occasionally the odd joke doesn’t land and it does at times rely on low brow humour, but admittedly those are the parts I laughed at the most because I am in fact quite low brow.
In terms of action there are actually several fight scenes which keeps things moving at a rapidfire pace.
Lorne Balfe as always provides an excellent score and I’m delighted we got the Police Squad music at the end too.
This movie feels very much like the other Naked Gun movies so everyone involved clearly wanted to honour what came before.
Overall, The Naked Gun is at times laugh out loud funny with Liam Neeson at his deadpan best; there is surprisingly some decent action while never forgetting to be silly. This was just what I needed tonight and recommend checking out as we could all use a good laugh these days.