The Naked Gun Is Stupid in the Best Possible Way
The pleasure of the old Naked Gun films, which starred Leslie Nielsen in what amounted to an extended, elaborately silly riff on Dragnet, was that they were stupid. Proudly, defiantly, often brilliantly stupid. Just flat-out dumb, trafficking in humor that appealed directly to a specific type of obnoxiously smarty-pants 11-year-old boy brain.Â
But the cop farces, from legendary gag-comic filmmakers Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker, who also made Airplane!, were also stupid in a way that was so clever that eventually you realized that they were somehow, actually, very, very smart.Â
The good news, then, is that the new Naked Gun is also incredibly stupid. The reboot opens with an extended riff on the bank heist from The Dark Knight, except this time it’s resolved when a petite schoolgirl with a lollipop skips into the bank and takes off a mask, Mission: Impossible style, to reveal that she’s actually a full-size Liam Neeson—who then proceeds to dispatch the bad guys with a murder lollipop and a dose of Matrix fu, all while wearing an uncomfortably short skirt.Â
This might even be the worst extended sequence in the movie. The references feel a little dated and the action sight gags don’t achieve quite the level of chaotic hilarity of the best of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. But like those old Naked Gun films it is defiantly silly in a way that sets the tone for the rest of the blessedly short movie.Â
The new Naked Gun is not just stupid but disarmingly stupid, a movie so insistently dumb that i
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