Police Squad! is back, now featuring Frank Dreblin's son - conveniently named Frank Dreblin Jr. (Liam Neeson). Along with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), he gets tied into a ridiculous conspiracy against a tech bro played by Danny Huston. But the plot doesn't really matter - is it funny?
Thankfully, it is. I guess I'd put it well below the original, and a little above the Naked Gun 2: The Smell of Fear; As directed by Akiva Schaffer (of Lonely Island fame) from a script by him plus Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, this new Naked Gun is a successful merging of his sensibilities (as in, for example, Popstar) and the original film's Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker maximalist approach.
It does a pretty admirable job in matching the original's density of silly jokes, but for the most part it stages one joke and moves on to the next instead of packing in multiple gags in a single shot. Serial instead of parallel piss-takes. This has advantages and disadvantages, and gives the film a fairly distinct feel... but I did notice it didn't really achieve the vintage ZAZ effect of overwhelming you under the onslaught of jokes of varying quality - when a joke falls flat here, it flounders. And partly as a result of that, and of some weak sections, the film as a whole doesn't feel quite as memorable, as larger-than-life, as its forebears.
Still: there are a lot of jokes, a lot of them very funny, and some of them featuring the sort of inventive boldness the ZAZ movies were known for. We get other people's inner dialogs butting into our hero's narration, ridiculous running gags that get increasingly ridiculous as they recur, an inspired montage-that-gets-out-of-control, and a really over-the-top final chase that manages to include a wonderful owl puppet. All that plus the expected quips, dad jokes, exaggerated bumbling, and visual double entenderes you might expect out of a modern comedy firmly situated on the sillier side of things. And it stays well away from the empty references - everything has a punchline. Good stuff.
A few of the jokes acknowledge some of the concerns people might have about making a light-hearted movie about cops, but Dreblin's trespasses are all pretty minimal; It's as if the movie knows it needs to address it, but is desperate to return to a more goofy, harmless tone. I'm ok with that, even if it feels like a missed opportunity. Guess the 'keep the politics (I happen to disagree with) away from art' crowd will be happy.
The same goes double with regards to the film's choice of villain - why make him a rich tech 'prophet' who owns a brand of electric cars and then completely decouple him from the obvious target? Both the reality of what the real-life enshittification gurus are pulling, and the all the depressingly lame evil shit Musk specifically has done? Is ripping off Kingsman really the best they could do?
I feel like I'm over-analyzing a movie where the main character convincingly disguises himself as a tiny schoolgirl, but why call attention to how toothless your satire is? Just avoid real-life parallels in the first place, job's done.
Neeson is an inspired bit of casting, and he and the rest of the cast attack their roles with the requisite seriousness, making their antics all the more funny. On the technical front, Schaffer has all the skills needed for good comedy: great blocking and crack timing; Other than that, between The Monkey and Weapons, horror comedies have regular comedies soundly beat on presentation. It's nowhere even near a contest.
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