THE NAKED GUN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: The Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams,
who together made AIRPLANE!, are back with a film version of
their cult TV show POLICE SQUAD!. It provides a few laughs
but is actually of a very different style from the TV show
and it is a misstep. Rating: 0.
You are going to have to stick with the old arm-chair historian on this one. THE NAKED GUN has a long history. In 1974 a film was made that was sort of a radical experiment in comedy films. THE GROOVE TUBE was a sort of satire on television that was not a single story but a set of black-out sketches lampooning all aspects of television. It spawned a host of imitators, one of the best being KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, which was written in large part by three men, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker. Like THE GROOVE TUBE, KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE was mostly made up of very short sketches but it included "A Fistful of Yen," a very extended satire on the Bruce Lee film ENTER THE DRAGON. It was clear that someone felt the same madcap style could be applied to longer satires. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a production company called Quinn-Martin was making a set of popular television series including THE F.B.I., THE FUGITIVE, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, THE INVADERS, and a police show or two, all using much the same style of story-telling, making them an easy target for satire. But television was not yet ready for the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker style of comedy. What made all the difference was when the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker took a mediocre but popular television movie TERROR IN THE SKY (which was in itself a remake of ZERO HOUR) and remade it using the same three-joke-a-minute style they had used in "A Fistful of Yen." The result was AIRPLANE! It proved to the networks that there was a viable market for satire--or at least the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker brand of satire. But could the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker style of humor be applied to a regular television series and could it garner an audience big enough to sustain it. In a word: no. While POLICE SQUAD! was certainly one of the most inventive comedy programs ever on network television, outside of a loyal core of fans (my wife among them), people saw it once or twice and then felt they had seen it. By the time it was on there were fewer Quinn-Martin productions on television anyway so perhaps fewer people even remembered the Quinn-Martin cliches like the dramatic voice reading the title of the episode. After one season of six shows the series was apparently no longer profitable enough to continue and was relegated to the ranks of cult television. Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker have since made two more theatrical films: TOP SECRET and now the POLICE SQUAD! movie, THE NAKED GUN.
While Police Lieutenant Drebbin (played by Leslie Nielsen) is off in Lebanon beating up every anti-American world and leader and warning them to keep out of America, one of his own undercover agents is shot, left for dead, and framed for heroin running. Drebbin investigates and finds at the heart of the matter a drug kingpin (played by Ricardo Montalban, in his second film adaptation of a cult television show) with a plan to kill Queen Elizabeth. I will not spend a lot of time on the plot since it is clear the filmmakers did not either. I will say that notably missing are some of the best running gags like the omniscient shoeshine boy and the frozen-scene end titles.
The real problem with the POLICE SQUAD! movie is that it is not really a POLICE SQUAD! movie. While it has a touch of the old style of three jokes a minute, it segues into the Inspector Clouseau style in which the jokes are as funny, probably, but each one lasts longer, and there are fewer. Clouseau humor relied on the personality that Peter Sellers was able to put into the character while the original POLICE SQUAD!'s jokes were a steady barrage from all directions. Leslie Nielsen's Drebbin does not have the personal appeal that Sellers gave Clouseau. As a lampoon of police shows POLICE SQUAD! took every cliche it could find and turned each one on its head. It took place in a uniformly insane world. THE NAKED GUN, like the Clouseau films, takes place in a sane world with one insane man. This leads to a different character of film altogether. It is slower and less interesting. I would think it would be unlikely people would want to see Nielsen reprise his role again and again the way Sellers was able to.
In spite of a number of funny moments, quite a number in fact, THE NAKED GUN is a misfire and will probably be a one-shot. Rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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