THE NAKED GUN

Having listened to director Akiva Schaffer talk at length about his process and goals on this thing (and, having caught up belatedly with The Lonely Island's Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and vowing to catch their stuff in theatres going forward) I was both in the tank for this and open to what Schaffer and crew were trying to achieve. The movie walks a number of thin lines - keeping the spirit of the original films alive while being its own thing, managing a plot that can handle the weight of this volume of jokes while still being clear and engaging as a story, an attempt at riffing on media as familiar to today's audience as 50s/60s cop shows would have been to TNG's 80s audiences, balancing a gentle but joke-intensive spoof on cop media with the political realities of the audience lives in a world where authoritarianism and lack of accountability run rampant. 

And on all of these fronts the thing succeeds more than handily - Liam Neeson sends up his work as a grizzled lone man of action and maps it beautifully into the legacy of Frank Drebin; Pamela Anderson offers a similarly funny take on the femme fatale rife in neo-noir. But this thing gets extra oomph from some surprising emotional affect, a split second in which Neeson lets us see Drebin, the out-of-time out-of-bounds lone wolf, squaring up for a kick-ass action scene...and deciding firmly to kill no one before fighting his way through. Some will suggest I'm overthinking/emoting here but this absolutely squares with the fundamentally decent humanism that radiates from Schaffer in his gentle interviews as well as his no-holds-barred podcast with The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers. And this lovely crystalline moment, too, folds in perfectly with the non-stop comic onslaught of the film as a whole. The movie never slows down long enough to make a show of its considerable heart; it just beats with the same effortless timing as everything else in it. 

(Parenthetically, fans still longing for yet another Lonely Island video after SNL50 absolutely get one here with the "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" sequence.)