★★★ (3 out of 4)
Dumb fun is all the rage these days—thanks, “Happy Gilmore 2” for playing your part—but “The Naked Gun,” a Liam Neeson reboot of the Leslie Nielson idiot police squad series, is the dumbest funnest of all. As detective Lt. Frank Drebin, Jr., the son of Nielsen’s cop, Neeson comes out firing both barrels for laughs. It’s not just that Neeson, 73 and the title holder as Mr. Gravitas for “Schindler’s List” and as the ”Taken” avenger, has broken his glum façade, he’s shattered it into pieces and all to reduce us to fits of giggles. And boy do we need them now.
The third and last Nielsen “Gun” farce, released three decades ago by the twisted and much-missed comic minds of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, used the ad line, “mostly all new jokes.” That truth still holds. But credit director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (“Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” “Hot Rod”) of the immortal Lonely Island comedy troop, with some wowza visual gags, such as our first look at Neeson dressed in a schoolgirl skirt to foil a bank robbery, removing his feminine mask and mystique to reveal a face craggier than anything on Mt. Rushmore.
There is a plot, though I didn’t want to spoil the flow by bringing it up. Danny Huston excels as Richard Kane, an electric-car industrialist (Elon? Maybe) who invents a toxic gas that will turn humans into animals or something like that. Frank’s boss (CCH Pounder) hates his unorthodox methods of policing—What? They’re the whole movie—but assigns him and his partner Ed Hocken, Jr. (the always welcome Paul Walter Houser in for the late George Kennedy) to investigate a car crash in Malibu related to the bank robbery. I won’t spoil it by saying how.
My advice is forget the plot and just watch Frank hook up with Pamela Anderson, following up her dramatic comeback role in “The Last Showgirl” and shaking her sillies out as Beth Davenport, the scat-singing author of books about true crimes based on stuff she makes up. Anderson and Neeson, reportedly a couple off screen, have real chemistry. And since they play every scene with a straight face, they couldn’t be more hilarious. Also, the action gets pretty rowdy for a movie rated PG-13. Hey, I’m not complaining.
Everything is ripe for ridicule, from the script’s skewering of police brutality to spoofing Frank’s love for the Black-Eyed Peas, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Sex and the City.” “Have you ever heard about Miranda rights?” rails one victim of Frank’s aversion to police procedure. Says an indignant Frank: “I’m sure it’s Carrie who writes!” Bada-boom!
And so it goes. If you don’t like one pun there’s another one right behind it. Not every joke works, but they come along with such zingy regularity that it doesn’t matter. What matters in this crazy world is nonsense, dished out by experts. “The Naked Gun” dishes it out so well you’ll laugh till it hurts.