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DokBrowne [ 7.5 ]
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I'm as happy as anyone that the remake cycle finally landed on something worthy of doing all over again and I sincerely hope we get a "2 1/2" and "33 1/3" out of this because spoofs are one of my favorite sub-genres and this new “Naked Gun” is on the right track, but I have to admit that it left me with a glass-half-empty aftertaste. At least moderately funny, I think we can all agree, and reviving a lot of the wonderfully screwy, corny, cross-eyed, wait-what-the.. jokes that we haven't seen movies do in ages, but man is there a lot of wasted space in here where they could've crammed in more jokes, the way a spoof is supposed to. I kept scanning the frames for extra background gags but only once in a long while were they included. And many of the actual laugh spots are victims of wobbly timing/editing and/or sputter out ineffectively (including the last shot of the movie, which is not how you wanna send your audience out), and considerably more often than in any of the 3 official "Naked Gun"s from back in the day.
Which is a little weird since Akiva Schaffer also made "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping", a consistently and bombastically hilarious neo-classic, and even his solidly enjoyable "Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers" lampoon of the TV-adaptation template might’ve had more inspired material than this "Naked Gun". Too many cooks on this one? Maybe it was just knowing that Seth MacFarlane's in the credits as producer but a portion of the humor had the vaguely dissatisfying aura of "Family Guy". And it just seems like there were opportunities to go harder, to double down on and/or snowball certain bits or refine them a bit more, but instead we get rough draft-style execution.
Still good enough, though! They used dummies like any good "Naked Gun" knows it must (as well as a certain weird mascot of the series), pay brief respect to Priscilla Presley (as the only surviving cast member of yore), the coffee cup runner never gets old, Liam Neeson is having a grand old time (even if he's not as perfectly expressive and controlled as Leslie Nielsen was), this may be the first occasion when I've ever felt compelled to compliment Pamela Anderson for her work, there's a "Buffy"-related nonsequitor that made my day, hooray for the snowman interlude, and I'm already looking forward to seeing it again, with better sound next time (part of me wonders if my experience was impaired by how low the volume seemed to be in the theater, dammit). Him biting the front off an enemy's handgun like it was a pretzel may have been my favorite joke on this first viewing.
But like, just as one more complaint, Paul Walter Hauser a swell actor who's been funny in stuff before makes much less of an impression than George Kennedy ever did, and the rest of the supporting cast beyond Neeson and Anderson are pretty blank too. You might consider Danny Huston a good sport as the villain but he's done villains before and this role's identical - yes everyone's job is to play it straight but you hope to see some comedic take of some frequency on any and all choices the movie makes, right? Maybe that's not fair, since Ricardo Montalban did the same thing in the first one, but I still think there's room for something more there (all due respect to the pretty funny way he reacts during the final showdown with Neeson).
In the end I'd say this is 60% of what "Naked Gun" is capable of as an IP (including the og series "Police Squad!"). Not the strongest execution or the ideal outcome of bringing it back to life, but as a former '80s/'90s kid I'm so starved for this kind of directly nonsensical parody that I'm going to rate it 3.5 stars anyway, be grateful for all the times I laughed, and join in the consensus celebration.
*why callback the old opening credits novelty of the siren driving around in funny places...in the end credits, instead of doing so at the start where it belongs, *and* merely taping together clips of the old ones instead of creating any that are new? That was extremely lazy.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.8 |
| No. Ratings | : 1 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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