Well, That Fell Right Off a Cliff

Comedy is hard. When you have a film that manages to nail its content, to become one of those comedies that everyone loves and enjoys, you absolutely want to capitalize on it. Make a sequel, continue the series, try to give people more of what they want. The trick is doing it in a way that is, well, actually still funny. When Zucker-Abrahams-ZuckerThis comedy collective, also known as ZAZ, consisted of two brothers and their best friend, and they went on to create some of the best parodies of their era. made Airplane! they knew well enough that their idea really only worked once and that they couldn’t easily strike that lightning in a bottle a second time (as Airplane II: The Sequel, without their involvement, clearly illustrated). The trio went off to make other movies and shows, to take their parodic ideas and apply them to new stories and different genres. They didn’t want to repeat themselves.

However, Police Squad! was such a big idea for them, one that they clearly thought they could propel for multiple seasons, that when that series was cut short they still wanted to pursue it. So a six episode season then led to a full length feature, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, and when the film became a smash success, they clearly thought they had enough ideas to make more. Well, one of them did. Only David Zucker had anything meaningful to do with The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, and you can feel that film straining to try and reach the legacy of the first film while running on less and less new ideas. It’s not a bad film but it does feel like a lesser entry for the franchise.

It was, however, another smash success for the series, and that meant the studio, Paramount Pictures, absolutely wanted yet another one. And so the remaining ZAZ team member, David Sucker, got on board to help co-write yet another feature. This time, however, even he decided not to direct, only working with fellow writers Pat Proft (with whom he'd written the second film) and Robert LoCash, while the director chair was handed off to Peter Segal. The resulting film, The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, came out in 1994, three years after the second movie, and, well, it just wasn’t very good. There’s no other way to put it.

It’s not that the film starts off poorly, though. Frank Drebin (a returning Leslie Neilsen) has retired from the force, looking to spend his days at home while his wife, Jane Spencer-Drebin (Priscilla Presley), pursues her law career. Her biological clock is ticking, though, and what she really wants with Frank is a family, something he’s struggled with due to frigidity and impotence (as the film quickly tells us). Plus, Jane fears that Frank just wants to be a cop, and when one last case tempts him in, he can’t help but set things aside for a day to help out his buddies on the Force and do one last job.

This, however, is the last straw for Jane and once she finds out where Frank has been she storms off, leaving him to go spend time with her friend out in the countryside. Frank, distraught, decides to pick up the case and bury himself in his work. It seems there’s a mad bomber, Rocco Dillon (Fred Ward), looking to set a bomb somewhere in Los Angeles, all to make a statement about… something. The Squad doesn’t know what, or when, or why, and they need Frank to infiltrate the prison where Dillon is at, become his best friend, and find out all the plans for the bombing. But this could be Frank’s most dangerous mission yet, and he’ll have to do everything to keep himself, and eventually Jane, alive.

When this movie originally came out I thought it was pretty bad. This despite it being a big, dumb, silly movie and my being thirteen at the time, the ripe age to enjoy a big, dumb, silly movie. But something about this film didn’t work for me back then and after that one viewing I never bothered going back to it again. Now, going through the series, I have to say that my original estimate of the film wasn’t entirely wrong – it is pretty bad, all things considered – but it also doesn’t start off that way.

The film actually has a pretty decent first act. Frank at home, being a house husband, gives the writers some decent material, as does his scenes working on the case, trying to get information on Rocco’s girlfriend, Tanya Peters (Anna Nicole Smith), at a fertility clinic. This first act has a lot of the witty jokes, fast lines, and over-the-top gags that this series is known for. If the entire movie could have been like this first act it would have been a real winner. It’s really zippy and energetic and almost made me wonder why I hated this film so much the first time around.

It’s once the actual plot of the film gets going, though, that the movie loses all momentum. When Frank goes into prison, the movie can’t think of anything better to do than a warmed over The Shawshank Redemption plotline. This is paired with Jane off on her own adventure, which is a really half-assed riff on Thelma and Louise. Paired together the two halves make you feel like the writers walked down the aisles at Blockbuster looking for popular movies they could lampoon instead of, you know, coming up with their own jokes.

This is still better than the last act, though. Once it’s revealed that the bomb will be at the Academy Awards, the film really falls apart. It’s a lot of riffs on the awards show itself, how much Leslie Nielsen looks like Phil Donohue, and then a bunch of gags of women falling into the orchestra pit. It feels less like a Police Squad! story and more like a low-grade cartoon from the 1950s. That’s not the style or energy these films should have, and it just feels lazy. They swap jokes for celebrities and prat falls, and the film is much worse for it.

And that’s to say nothing about a pretty awful trans-panic joke that comes in the last stages of the act. It’s really cringey and awful, having no real reason to be in the film beyond the writers thinking that a low-blow trans joke will make everyone laugh. And in the mid-1990s, maybe it would have (since gay- and trans-panic jokes were regular material back then). But it certainly hasn’t helped the film at all, and it absolutely ages the film now. It’s the kind of gag that makes me never want to watch the film again (right up there with the trans-panic joke at the heart of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective).

While still successful, making $132 Mil against a $30 Mil budget, the lower Box Office take in comparison to the previous films, along with the scathing critical reviews, effectively sunk this series after this third entry. The various ZAZ creators went off to make their own movies, while Leslie Nielsen went on to make a number of other pretty terrible parody movies (like Spy Hard and Dracula: Dead and Loving It) that never had a chance of rising to the great heights of his earlier comedies. And then it took nearly 30 years for another film in the series to come along.

All things considered this was probably for the best. After six episodes, and three films, just about everything that could be said about Police Squad! had been said, and then some. The series ran its course and while it would have been nice for the franchise to go out on a high note, or even a medium note, that’s not how it played out. The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult is a bad movie that probably shouldn’t have been made. But at least it helped to put the series out to pasture for some time, giving audiences a long wait to sit back and fondly remember what worked about the series while ignoring all the bits that didn’t. Like this third film, which really didn’t work at all.