Oh, I needed this tonight. There has been some discourse about the new Naked Gun with Liam Neeson that currently appears to be coming out in August; I saw the first trailer for it the other day and am… well, not entirely convinced. I wasn’t sure that it felt like a “Naked Gun movie”, if you know what I mean, but the concluding joke about OJ Simpson was gold and you can’t always take a trailer as being necessarily indicative of the whole film (which I will likely wind up seeing at some point)… and, to be sure, the original film doesn’t exactly feel like Police Squad!, the TV series that inspired it, either. It strikes me now that it’s actually kind of like how the Monty Python movies relate to the Python TV series, in that both clearly relished the opportunity to not only spend a ton of extra money but also to do jokes that were rather more crass than they could’ve gotten away with on TV in those days (“sexual assault with a concrete DILDO!”)… In any case, the new film inspired me to dig out the old one, which I haven’t seen in years. I don’t have the same relationship with the film as I do the series, in that I kept finding new jokes the series even twenty years after first watching it; the film doesn’t really offer me new discoveries like that. But on this rewatch I think I did get a new sense of just how immaculate the comic timing is throughout the film (something like “Drebin!” “Frank!” “You’re both right” is so much funnier than it seems on paper because of how Ricardo Montalban, Priscilla Presley and Leslie Nielsen all deliver it), and just how well cast all the characters are. I still think it runs out of puff a bit in the baseball game climax, and some of the period references are very dated, but for the most part what an absolute delight The Naked Gun still is. The new version is going to have a hard time living up to it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.