Tales from the Naked City

Having gone back and watched some of the early films from Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (collectively known as ZAZ), it’s clear that, early on in their careers, these guys were comedy geniuses. If you put the three of them on a project, gave them some kind of loose, preexisting script, and set them on the task of making that story into a parody comedy film, they could knock it out of the park. They worked magic turning the 1957 disaster film Zero Hour! into the zany, non-stop laughs comedy of Airplane! They took the tropes of spy films and made the delightfully weird Top Secret! And they saw all the tropes and stories from 1950s and 1960s cop drams and created the fantastic Police Squad! These guys were great at what they did.

That success couldn’t last, though. As the trio of filmmakers got famous, especially after the critical and commercial success of 1986’s Ruthless People, the directors eventually decided to go their separate ways. Each kept their hands in the world of comedies, even frequently working on parodies, but they didn’t direct any films together as a team. Instead, for their next big project, the trio wrote The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, their follow-up to Police Squad! meant for the big screen, but only David Zucker directed it… and it kind of shows.

You get the vibe, watching behind the scenes discussions of Airplane!, that these guys were great working as a collective, especially when they had something specific to lampoon. And while The Naked Gun (which is how we’re going to refer to the film for the rest of the review) was based on one of their own projects, it doesn’t feel like it has that same manic energy the collective brought to their earliest films, nor the specificity to make the film shine. The Naked Gun feels like a parody that’s trying a little too hard to be fun, like the film is mugging for the camera to say, “hey, I’m being funny.” Many jokes do land but, in comparison to the dead pan brilliance of ZAZ’s earliest works, The Naked Gun doesn’t quite have what it takes to be a classic (which I know will wound many that actually do think this film is a classic).

The Naked Gun picks up with Police Squad Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) six years after his last adventure. He’s been on vacation, getting over a cheating wife and a broken heart. Showing up in the Middle East, Drebin invades a meeting of the various terrorist leaders of the world (Iran, Iraq, Russia, et al) and kicks all their asses for the United States. When he gets back to L.A., though, he has a new assignment: protect the Queen of England (Jeannette Charles) from a possible assassination attempt.

Well, Frank being Frank, he tries a little too hard and gets a little too overzealous and he ends up getting into a compromising position with the Queen. He also gets into trouble after looking in shady businessman, and possible ringleader of a terrorist attack, Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán), accidentally setting the businessman’s apartment on fire, sexually harassing a woman with a statue’s stone penis, and setting a bunch of actually needed evidence on fire. Removed from the Force, Drebin can’t let go of the case, but without the squad’s resources does he have any chance of stopping the assassination at all?

Watching The Naked Gun, there were times where it felt like a proper continuation of Police Squad! These were moments clearly cribbed from the show: reaction shots from Drebin to things going on around him, visits to the lab, the appearance of the very tall Al (Tiny Ron). There were also bits that felt like they could have been in the television show but weren’t maybe because of their content, such as Drebin commenting to a woman as she climbs a ladder, “nice beaver,” before she brings a stuffed beaver down. These were moments where the film felt like a proper ZAZ production and it was firing on all cylinders.

Unfortunately these moments didn’t come often enough in a film that otherwise felt like it was straining to find the comedy. More often than not our detective would wander into a room and get up to zany antics all on his own. I like Leslie Nielsen a lot as an actor, and I think he was great as a comedic, dead-pan actor. This film, though, doesn’t use this aspect of his character at all. Instead it feels like the film forgets, more often than not, why Nielsen was brought into these movies at all. He mugs, he overacts, and tries to sell bits. The thing he very infrequently does is act like Frank Drebin and it means that bits that would have sold themselves for being incredibly over-the-top while Frank acts stone-faced don’t work because even Frank knows what’s going on is incredibly silly.

It doesn’t help that the actual plot of the film barely hangs together. The film sets up a mystery about who might be behind the assassination attempt on the Queen, but immediately (before the case even starts) spoils the ending. It reveals Ludwig as a bad guy (when he shoots Drebin’s partner, Det. Nordberg, as played by O. J. Simpson), and then almost immediately puts Frank on his scent. There’s no back and forth tension, no cat and mouse. Hell, the two barely share any screen time. The film faffs around for a while, doing everything it can other than have Frank solve the case because it really only has twenty minutes of plot (like an episode of Police Squad!) which it’s stretched to hour-and-a-half length just to get the job done. It doesn’t work

I think a big reason for that is because this is an original story the trio came up with and it isn’t based on anything, directly or loosely. The film lacks the specificity of Police Squad! as it doesn’t have one movie to play off of. It doesn’t even really play off a genre properly since police movies of the era were more like Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop than cop dramas of the 1960s. Had the film paired Drebin up with a young, crazy hot-shot and made him react to the antics going on from this new cop that would have worked better. It could have played on the specificity of the genre as it stood in the mid-1980s while also giving Drebin someone to play off of so he didn’t have to be the straight man and the looney guy all at the same time. That might have helped the film find the right energy.

That or the film could have had Drebin solve three cases instead of one. There’s enough material here for one real episode of Police Squad!, so if they’d given Frank three cases (which he either solved one at a time or concurrently) that would have filled the film better while also better playing to the concept’s strengths. It’s like the ZAZ team picked the worst options instead and made a film that actually feels like less than the sum of its parts. It leaves The Naked Gun feeling like a worse version of Police Squad!, which is weird considering the same hands were involved in both.

Of course, I do want to acknowledge that this comes from seeing the film almost forty years after it originally came out. I didn’t like it when I watched it for this review, but audiences ate it up at the time. The film was made on a budget of $14.5 Mil and went on to bring in over $152.4 Mil during its run, which was solid money. It was enough to get two more sequels greenlit over time (with a legacy sequel coming later this year) and for the ZAZ trio to continue getting work in other films. I just don’t feel like the film has aged well or plays like it should anymore.

It feels old, tired, and worn down. It lacks the punch and wit of the previous films from the ZAZ trio, that manic energy that made every frame a joke. This is a watered down version of that vision, put to film by only one of the three minds behind their early classics, and it shows. This isn’t the collective zaniness of ZAZ, but the final vision of one of the Zuckers, and it holds the film back. I went into the movie expecting to love it, but I came away from it wishing that they’d kept Drebin back in the Police Squad!