From the very beginning of the medium, the police procedural has been inescapable on television. Detective stories have been popular since the days of Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The modern cops and robbers show can trace its roots back to Dragnet, which was a radio show dramatizing real cases from the files of the LAPD — with major emphasis on the “dramatizing” part. Jack Webb got the idea for the series while he was working a bit part in the low-budget noir They Walk by Night, and by the mid-’50s, it was one of the most popular shows on television. Millions tuned in week after week to watch heroic, square-jawed police officers bring degenerate perpetrators to justice. Decades later, not much has changed. CBS still fills entire nights of their prime-time schedule with crime scene investigators, FBI agents, and military police who solve crimes in various locales (which are currently offering tax incentives to television productions).
These shows have always been formulaic. The appeal of the police procedural is the comforting feeling of the world being put to right. The audience must be given a puzzle to solve and be assured that the power of the state will keep them safe from scary scofflaws. The nature of the criminals and bad guys changes to suit the current needs of the state and the preferences of the people in power. In the 1960s, Jack Webb famously took on hippies on acid in Dragnet. In the late ’70s, Quincy, M.E. made punk rockers the ultimate evil in an episode that is so bad it’s actually good. After 9/11, every TV detective turned to counterterrorism for a good decade. That’s why police procedurals are often called “copaganda.”
Anything that hidebound and formulaic is ripe for mockery, and in the ’70s and ’80s, nobody mocked better than Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker. They skewered the disaster movie with the all-time classic Airplane! and gave Val Kilmer his greatest role as an incompetent spy in Top Secret! In 1982, they tried their hand at TV with Police Squad! Leslie Nielsen was famous for playing straight-laced authority figures in films like Forbidden Planet when Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker tapped him to play police detective Frank Drebin. He’s not the smartest guy to ever wear a badge, but the people he’s surrounded by are even stupider, so he’s like a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker’s combination of vaudevillian slapstick and winking meta-humor proved to be ahead of its time for ABC, and Police Squad! was canceled after no one watched the six hilarious episodes. But the style would prove hugely influential for the comedy writers who would go on to create The Simpsons and Family Guy.
Frank Drebin lived on in theaters. The Naked Gun, where Drebin thwarts a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth with the help of Priscilla Presley and a pre-murder O.J. Simpson, was the funniest film of 1988. It inspired two sequels, and eventually Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was tapped to reboot the series.
After much time in development hell, MacFarlane ended up as executive producer, and Lonely Island alum Akiva Schaffer landed in the director’s chair. If you haven’t seen Schaffer’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, starring Andy Samberg as a Justin Timberlake-like singer who tries to go back to his boy-band roots, do yourself a favor and seek it out immediately.
For Frank Drebin Jr., they enlisted Liam Neeson, and it turned out to be an inspired choice. Neeson has the chops of a serious actor, but like Nielsen, he got stuck in a career rut as an action movie guy. Neeson knows Nielsen’s secret: No matter how stupid things get, play everything ramrod straight, just like you would in a “serious” film like Taken.
This version of The Naked Gun casts a wider net than Dragnet and S.W.A.T. It opens with one of the most beloved cliches in action filmmaking: the militarized bank robbery. Criminals kitted out with body armor and AR-15s have descended on a bank, and the police have surrounded the building. The suave robber who is clearly the main guy saunters past the cowering customers and blows the lock to a safety deposit box. Inside is a shiny computer-looking thingy labeled “P.L.O.T. DEVICE.”
Yeah, this film is not subtle. If you can’t handle the punny heat, stay out of the Police Squad! kitchen. Or something like that.
Detective Drebin infiltrates the bank disguised as a schoolgirl with a weaponized lollipop. But things go south, and he and his partner Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) are demoted to plain-clothes traffic cops. (This should be a ridiculous joke, by the way, but it’s a real thing in the state of Tennessee.)
On the traffic beat, Drebin is investigating the death of a software designer in a self-driving car crash when he’s contacted by the victim’s sister in true film noir fashion. Beth (Pamela Anderson) is a true crime writer who wants to be a real detective. Predictably, the two fall for each other, as the investigation reveals a connection to the Elon Musk-like tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who has a plan to take over the world involving the P.L.O.T. Device and Weird Al Yankovic.
Schaffer has perfected the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker technique of flooding the zone with so many gags that some of them are bound to hit. He combines many classic Police Squad! gags, like Drebin’s loose relationship to gun safety and his overly literal interpretations of greetings, with new concepts, like when Drebin’s body camera reveals his crippling chili dog addiction. Anderson and Neeson have exceptional comedic chemistry together, and are reportedly dating in real life. One particularly inspired sequence has them sneaking away to a weekend love nest, only to be attacked by a demon-possessed snowman. (My description doesn’t do it justice.)
To be honest, I cringed when I heard MacFarlane was rebooting The Naked Gun, but I have to admit my fears were overblown. At a brisk 90 minutes, this comedy doesn’t overstay its welcome. Now stop calling me Shirley.
The Naked Gun
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