Frank Drebin Jr., the blissfully, unselfconsciously silly hero played by Liam Neeson in “The Naked Gun,” has a genius for disaster. Frank is a detective in Los Angeles, where he fights crime and bends the law, intentionally and not. With his loose ties and weary mien, he resembles a cop right out of central casting, like one of those precinct old-timers who crack cynical in a television police procedural. If Frank seems especially suited for the assignment it’s because he’s a chip off the old blockhead, and is following — with elaborate pratfalls and many, many nonsensical misunderstandings — his father’s bumbling, stumbling example.
The original blockhead, of course, was Frank Drebin Sr., played to doltish perfection by Leslie Nielsen in a trilogy that started with “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (1988). A spinoff of a short-lived TV series, “Police Squad!” (1982), the movies wrung laughs from the gulf between their hero’s deadpan self-seriousness and his and the world’s wholesale absurdity. At one point in the first film, Frank goes undercover as a baseball umpire and flamboyantly calls strikes while Reggie Jackson threatens to kill Queen Elizabeth and a villainous Ricardo Montalban bites down on a severed human finger tucked in a hot dog bun.
The new movie largely adheres to the formula created by the wisenheimers (Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Pat Proft) behind the first “Naked Gun.” As before, the new movie is fronted by a performer better known for clenched-jaw sobriety than slipping on banana peels. Nielsen, among other roles, played the doomed captain in “The Poseidon Adventure.” Neeson has a tonier, more diverse résumé and the peer recognition to go with it, having earned an Oscar nod for his title role in “Schindler’s List.” Beginning with “Taken” (2009), though, he has also become a fixture in the kind of violent, elaborately plotted thrillers that go so over the top they verge on, and at times regress into, unwitting self-parody.
The story here is certainly the least of it and involves Frank’s getting in and out of trouble as well as in and out of his car amid goofy word play and set pieces, like an early bank robbery that turns into a slapstick free-for-all. He’s soon making eyes at the resident slinkstress (a winning Pamela Anderson), crossing paths with a power-grubbing tech villain (Danny Huston, spot on) and engaging in much foolishness at the precinct and elsewhere. CCH Pounder shows up as Frank’s beleaguered boss while Paul Walter Hauser plays his work bestie. There are nods to the earlier movies, including an unfunny bit about O.J. Simpson, a fixture in the trilogy, and some digs at police brutality that are almost offensively toothless.
Like the original filmmakers, the cut-ups here — the director is Akiva Schaffer, who shares script credit with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand — have embraced both obviousness and maximalism with gusto. The timing is generally brisk, the jokes proudly ludicrous and bountiful; le cinéma des Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges remain a series touchstone. Schaffer throws a lot at the screen (he smartly toggles back and forth between verbal humor and physical comedy), and tosses everything out at a rapid-enough clip that you don’t have time to groan at the softer, weaker material. Taken individually, a lot of the jokes might not work, but when you’re in a blizzard you don’t notice each snowflake.
There’s heavy poetry in Neeson’s face, which is etched with lines and palpable melancholy, and initially he can seem almost too good an actor to play a character as obtuse as Frank. And then there’s the reality that it can sometimes take a bit of time to accept a new performer in a role that was so synonymous with another; laughing too hard at the replacement can almost feel like a betrayal. Neeson’s first splashily violent big number in “The Naked Gun” is appropriately ridiculous. As the movie continues, though, the actor adds emotional texture to the character and another, somewhat similar yet also different-enough Frank Drebin emerges. It’s nice to see him, particularly if — like me — you’re in desperate need of a few good laughs.
The Naked Gun
Rated PG-13 for goofy violence and sultry nonsense. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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