More than 20 years have passed since the last Naked Gun movie, a threequel that included O.J. Simpson in his last role prior to his 1994 arrest. The film series, starring Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin, was spun off from Police Squad!, a one-season sitcom full of absurd jokes and goofy gags. The Naked Gun maximized its silly factor, and the films live on in the form of YouTube joke montages. Like all once-valuable, semi-nostalgic intellectual property, The Naked Gun felt rife for a reboot, and so the Akiva Schaffer–directed sequel starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. will hit theaters on August 1. While sequel, prequel, and reboot fatigue has never been higher, when the teaser aired ahead of a showing of The Phoenician Scheme in New York, people were laughing out loud at the jokes.
Neeson and Schaffer already feel like a perfect pair for The Naked Gun. Neeson has always been an underrated comedian: No one else holds a straight face while saying the goofiest stuff imaginable. Schaffer, on the other hand, is responsible for some of the past two decades’ best comedy, which is to say, some of the best work to exist in the legacy of The Naked Gun. The Lonely Island writer and director had his hand in MacGruber, Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave. The new trailer also introduces Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. — that all the new detectives are sons of the originals is already a classic bit, especially the unfortunate son of O.J. Simpson’s Detective Nordberg) — and Pamela Anderson as Beth, the film’s new femme fatale and/or damsel in distress. She runs away with the new trailer’s best gag, when she’s invited to take a chair and quite literally leaves the room dragging a chair behind her. So far, between this, Friendship, and One of Them Days, it’s shaping up to be a good year for comedies — which, good, some of us could use the laugh. While some movies might front-load their best jokes into their trailers, The Naked Gun promises the best is yet to come.
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The Liam Neeson–starring reboot might just be worthy of its predecessors.
