I was born in 1969. That means I was a ’70s kid and an ’80s teen. As such, the acronym ZAZ is very sacred to me.
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker are the team of writer-directors who, from 1977 to 1994, produced some of the most uproarious comedies of all time, including “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” “Airplane,” “Top Secret,” and, of course, the “Naked Gun” trilogy.
When I heard there was going to be a “Naked Gun” remake/reboot/sequel, I didn’t freak out. Remakes can actually be good.
They can also be brilliant, like John Carpenter’s “The Thing” or Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspira.”
So my first reaction to these kinds of announcements is generally somewhere between “Who cares?” and “Let’s see what happens.”
The casting of Liam Neeson in the lead put this one firmly in the latter category for me.
Remember, before Abrahams and the Zucker boys cast Leslie Nielsen in “Airplane,” he was a serious actor, playing serious characters in serious films. Their brilliance was to take a serious actor and give him a serious character, but drop it into the most unserious scenarios they could write.
While he was only a supporting character in the “Airplane” movies, giving him the lead role in the original “Naked Gun” made him a comedy god.
Neeson, with his “very particular set of skills,” may have been the best possible bulb to screw into that socket. So when they announced him as the lead in this one, I was intrigued and, against my better judgment, a little excited.
And then came the marketing campaign, and that excitement left my body faster than all the lesbian celebrities left America after the 2024 election.
Observing the absolutely unavoidable deluge of trailers, TV commercials, and social media ads over the past few months, I think I laughed once… maybe twice.
This movie looked terrible. I quickly relegated it to the “who cares” bin and went on with my life.
But then, over the past week, something bizarre and totally unexpected happened. The reviews started coming in, and they were good. Hell, some were great.
“The Naked Gun” is rated 90% fresh on RottenTomatoes.com, with a 79% audience rating. It’s got a slightly lower score of 75 at MetaCritic, which still notes that the reviews have been “generally positive.”
More importantly, some friends whose opinions I actually trusted saw it Friday night and liked it.
So now, of course, I had to see it. And I did. On Saturday afternoon, with four other people in the theater. Three of us were there by ourselves.
And we laughed. Kind of a lot.
I’m not gonna say it’s great, and I’m not gonna say it stands up to the originals. But I was entertained.
Liam Neeson was as good in the part of the new Frank Drebin (the son of Nielsen’s character from the originals) as I thought he’d be.
And Pamela Anderson, who already proved she can act in 2024’s “The Last Showgirl,” shows off some legit comedy chops. Her “performance” in the jazz club is one of the highlights of the movie.
Their chemistry is great, which is probably why they’re kickin’ it in real life, too.
The one complaint I have is the ending, which takes place at a WWFC mixed martial arts event.
There are no zany sight gags involving the fighters, no jokes about the sport or its audience; you know, the way they parodied Major League Baseball in the original, or the Oscars in Part 3. It was just an MMA event going on in the background.
Even when the entire audience starts brawling, there are no heads being punched off, no obvious dummies being tossed around… not even a random tiger attack. Mostly it’s just extras throwing punches in the background.
Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker would have never let that happen. And although they weren’t involved in this movie and didn’t seem to support it, the new guys should never had made this mistake.
Still, I did feel enough of the ZAZ spirit in this new “Naked Gun” to believe that if they should decide to see this movie, they might, against their better judgment, actually like it.
Just like I did.
