Akiva Schaffer has truly outdone himself with his latest feat in the director’s chair as The Naked Gun beats all expectations and becomes one of the funniest films in nearly a decade’s comedy drought. For those unaware of the original trilogy or better yet the short run of the television series Police Squad, truly be ashamed that you have yet to be introduced into this world of brilliant satire and parody. 

 

The sole idea of replacing Leslie Nielsen with another actor seemed almost disrespectful, but after a bit of conversation and clip surveying - Neeson seemed like he would more than likely be the man for the job if given the proper material. Luckily for all us The Naked Gun fans, he was given the perfect material to run with - overloaded with joke after joke, in which not all land but there’s so many it’s impossible to have any of the humor completely miss your funnybone. 

 

To be clear, this is exactly the kind of juvenile yet intelligent humor that we’ve been missing out on for decades now and those that don’t enjoy the comedy stylings of the original The Naked Gun trilogy or Airplane! may come out of this film without a single chuckle eradicated from their vocal chords. 

 

Smartly this new iteration is not entirely rebooting the series and instead going the legacy route by making this version of Frank Drebin a junior. The Naked Gun films have never been about the story, they’ve been about the swift humor developed within the “mystery of the week” format and not to mention the over the top romance between Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley, which in turn is exchanged for an over the top, slightly underdeveloped romance between Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. 

 

Neeson especially is perfect at delivering drypan humor, coming from a dramatic background to then go on to be in the action genre and now relaying those skills to comedy of the highest pedestal. The film spoofs the police procedural that litters television with their nonstop repetition to this day, a perfect target for modern parody - while being able to throw it back to the nostalgia of the original tone. Nostalgia runs high with this one, returning some well planned jokes from the past to the big screen and garnering just as much, if not more laughter.

 

From the bizarre (a snowman come to life) to the traditional (a villain with a plan to take over) to the bizarre (a owl recantation) to the traditional (an inside job within an inside job within an inside job) - The Naked Gun understands how to properly blend the expected with remarkable satire that will have you choking with laughter while going, “WTF”.  

 

Apart from a few jokes being thrown by with little impact, the biggest mistake is the lack of involvement of the surrounding cast. Paul Walter Hauser plays Ed Jr. and in his minimal time on screen is terrific, but he’s sadly underutilized. Same can be said for the quick gag of all the descendants sitting beneath their parents' pictures when Frank asks his father for help from the beyond. There’s a short joke regarding O.J. Simpson's Nordberg having a son and considering how big that character was in the original trilogy, I do wish they hadn’t almost entirely written him off. 

 

Comedies are incredibly sparse these days and the last time a comedy hit this hard was Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping which had an unfortunate fate at the box office. This decade in particular had been rough for comedy theatrical appearances and here’s hoping that people turn out in droves for this latest offering from producer Seth MacFarlane and the same brilliant man behind the camera - Akiva Schaffer. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by… sitting at 85 minutes it’ll pass like the hottest sauce - you’ll cry, you’ll scream, you’ll laugh and you’ll ultimately be left with a burning sensation when it’s all over… but you won’t regret it in the slightest.