BEING FRANK (THE NAKED GUN)

 

THE NAKED GUN

We all know Liam Neeson can do comedy.

We've seen him do it before in small doses.

The Northern Irish actor had the best moment in Ricky Gervais' BBC sitcom 'Life's Too Short' with his improv sketch.

Then there was in the cereal scene in Seth MacFarlane's 'Ted 2'.

There have also been chances to test his comic chops in 'Derry Girls,' on Stephen Colbert's chat show and as Good Cop/Bad Cop in 'The Lego Movie'.

But can he carry a whole comic movie?

Neeson gets the chance to find that out in Akiva Schaffer's 'The Naked Gun' - a reboot of David Zucker's 1988 comedy classic with Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, George Kennedy and OJ Simpson.

Produced by Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins and working from a script by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mend, Neeson has a very high bar to clear - playing the son of Nielsen's bungling detective Frank Drebin.

Like Frank Snr, Neeson's Frank Jr is an accident prone numbskull who works for Los Angeles' elite detective unit Police Squad.

After disrupting a bank robbery disguised as a schoolgirl, he's unable to prevent the robbers making off with the contents of a safety deposit box - a device known as 'the P.L.O.T. device' (geddit?) which has the ability to use sonic waves to change ordinary Joes into violent, feral beings.

This unfortunately falls into the hands of Danny Huston's megalomaniac tech entrepreneur Richard Cane who intends to unleash it on the world's population at a New Year's Eve Ultimate Fighting Championship fight while he and a group of elite people flee to a bunker in the hope that the planet'scitizens will tear themselves apart.

Re-emerging after most people have killed each other, they intend to create a new Eden.

The inventor of the device, Jason MacDonald's Simon Davenport had intended the device would be used to calm people down.

However he has wound up dead in an electric car crash which is being investigated by Frank and his colleague, Paul Walter Hauser's Ed Hocken Jr (the son of George Kennedy's character in the original).

The car is one of Cane's and a matchbox at the scene also links the victim to a club run by the entrepreneur.

Davenport's glamorous, crime novel writing sister, Pamela Anderson's Beth is eager to get to the bottom of his death too.

This means her path inevitably crosses with Frank and romance blossoms as their trail brings them to Cane's club.

Can Beth and Frank find the evidence to link the entrepreneur to Simon's death?

Or will Cane succeed in his dastardly plot to cause mayhem and violence on the streets of LA and across the world?

Neeson, Anderson, Hauser, Huston and CCH Pounder as Drebin's boss really commit themselves to the reboot which looks like a 'Naked Gun' film and waddles like a 'Naked Gun' film.

The problem is it just can't quack like a 'Naked Gun' film.

While Schaffer, Gregor and Mend pepper spray their audience with visual gags and one liners, none of them land like the jokes in the original.

As a result, the movie ends up becoming heavily reliant on getting cheap laughs with toilet humour and crude sex jokes.

Working hard for their audience's laughs, Neeson, Hauser, Huston and Pounder lean a bit too heavily into their parts.

They lean so heavily you can see every muscle strain as they desperately try to prove they can carry a comic film - not that Hauser has anything to prove given his superb supporting performance in 'Cruella'.

As a result, the gags splutter and wheeze before they reach their rather obvious punchlines.

And as you slide into a depression watching good actors flounder, the film demonstrates just how good Nielsen, Presley (who makes a brief cameo), Kennedy, Ricardo Montalban as the chief villain and even OJ Simpson were at deadpan delivery in the original.

Watching Neeson struggle in the lead role, you feel Schaffer's version is a big opportunity missed.

When Neeson has previously been at his comic best, it has been because he has been playing absurd roles as if they were serious.

As Frank Drebin Jr, he dials everything up to 11 to the extent where he seems to be screaming to the audience how wacky it all is - except it's not.

An opportunity is wasted to send up his poor run of action movies in recent times.

But if there is a bright spot, it's Anderson who really embraces the chance to be silly - particularly in a nightclub scat singing sequence.

However just like every element in Schaffer's film, the gag is milked so hard, it just goes bone dry.

While the film tries hard to ape Nielsen's gumshoe detective voiceover, Neeson's growling narration falls way short and feels very dated.

Detective films just don't enjoy the popularity they once did.

And that leaves you thinking that maybe Schaffer and the writing team would have been better off sending up another, more popular genre that resonates with contemporary audiences like superhero movies?

With the exception of one nightclub quip about cops shooting civilians, all the best jokes in this version of 'The Naked Gun' are sadly in the trailer.

But even these gags and the cameos from Dave Bautista, Weird 'Al' Yankovic and Busta Rhymes don't come up to the standards of the original.

This version of 'The Naked Gun' is about as funny as 'Mrs Brown's Boys' and it could well prove just as popular.

But if you want laughs, maybe it's time to revisit the Nielsen original?

('The Naked Gun' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on August 1, 2025)