Now and then, when I am at risk of taking myself too seriously, an old-fashioned slapstick comedy is a most satisfactory remedy. “The Naked Gun” (Paramount Pictures), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is the most potent such remedy to have come along in ages. “Who are you?” asks a character in the opening minutes. “Frank Drebin. Police Squad. The new version,” he replies—and the starting pistol is fired on a breezy one hour and twenty-five minutes of relentless wisecracks, giggles, and groans.
What struck me last Friday evening, opening night at the Playhouse, was that the frequent belly laughter from the large audience—noticeable within the first few minutes after, “I was furious about the Janet Jackson Super Bowl!” “That was twenty years ago!”—was the real thing. Nowadays comedy isn’t really like this—“The Naked Gun” feels like a clean throwback to the 1980s and it takes a while to get back into this groove, like mounting a pushbike again after many years. The style of the “Naked Gun” (like the earlier “Airplane” movies) has always been to reward the audience for paying very close attention to what is going on at the outsides of the screen, not just to the characters. I didn’t expect to be so impressed with how faithfully this has been recreated in 2025.
Frank, played by Liam Neeson, is moved from investigating armed robbery to traffic violations after a botched rescue operation in a bank, during which a small computer called “P.L.O.T. DEVICE” is stolen. He is ordered to wear a body camera pointed in the wrong direction—at Frank rather than away from him—so that the station can keep an eye on him. Looking into the death of a man following a car crash, he teams up with the victim’s sister, Beth, played by Pamela Anderson, who writes “true crime novels based on fictional crimes that I make up.” While helping Frank’s investigation she falls in love with him. Bond-baddie clone Richard Cane, played by Danny Huston, has developed an evil audio-frequency device “which reduces the brain to its animalistic core,” and will activate it during a wrestling match on New Year’s Eve. His dastardly plan includes protecting a few of the chosen inside a “super bunker,” to emerge later as a group called the “Founding Fathers of a new Eden.” (All very “Moonraker” (1979).)
The filmmakers are actually using the body camera as a plot device: a day in Frank’s life is always a non-stop series of chaotic ups and downs. Take a scene where a suspect from the robbery has been hauled in for questioning. Given that Frank is much more interesting to the audience, the body camera allows a neat pivot back to a study of him when he is alone carrying on his detective work (downing five chilli hot dogs and using his gun to disperse a queue waiting outside a restroom, for instance). The second device that is used successfully to mix the semi-serious business of the plot with the completely nonsensical is Frank’s off-camera monologue (on the crazy end would be something like “In this city usual is unusual…usually”).
“Sometimes to get the job done you have to break the law; I do it all the time,” Frank says. “Since when do cops have to follow the laws?” There is a hilarious example towards the end involving the abduction and drugging of one of the baddie’s lackeys. Much of the humour is made up of classic one-liners— “She had a body that carried a head around.” “Make one more move and I’ll blow its computer brains right over the floor.” The other major style is short plays-on-words between characters: “May I speak freely?” “I prefer English;” or, “Testosterone levels are down across the board.” “I’ve never put my testosterone across a board.” Or comedic misunderstandings where expressions have two different meanings—Frank suggests that Beth “Take a seat,” and she physically picks one up and takes it with out of the police station. And we always have to keep a beady eye on what goes on on the outermost part of the shot—a riff on coffee cups, or “sparkling water” arriving as a glass with a sparkler poking out, or the side of a prison being pulled away as Frank drives his new car for the first time. I’ll reveal nothing about the set-piece scene involving a dog, a turkey baster and a pair of night-vision glasses except that it is side-splittingly funny.
The trick with this kind of humour is to keep it deadpan—enough of the characters must play their roles entirely straight. As such, many of the funniest scenes include Frank’s boss, Chief Davis, superbly played with precisely the right degree of mock-seriousness by CCH Pounder. In a hilarious sequence after she has been woken from sleep to be told of Frank’s latest shenanigans, she orders, “Get me Drebin,” at which point he appears immediately, genie-like, in her bedroom. Without missing a heartbeat, she starts dressing him down in an insistent whisper because her husband, lying next to her in bed wearing his pyjamas and sporting airline-style eyeshades, mustn’t be disturbed. The scene is flawless. Later, she marches into the marvellously named “Ponzi-Scheme Arena,” supporting her husband—still in his pyjamas and eyeshades, fast asleep—on her right arm.
One tip: make sure not to skip until the very end of the credits, when the Paramount logo re-appears. The first part is accompanied by a truly terrible love song that Frank has composed for Beth (Mr Neeson cannot sing). But buried as text within the rolling list of names can be found such bonbons as: “On set dressing—RANCH/RUSSIAN/ITALIAN/VINAIGRETTE,“ “Tool (non-person)—BUZZ SAW,” “Netflix Password,” “Tennis Grips,” “Please Read Aloud” (followed by an optician’s eye-examination chart).
The film proper closes with a knowing wink to Mr Neeson’s age—Frank describes the various advantages of “old men.” And while seeming to describe the benefits of seeking revenge, vigilante style, against mortal enemies—“A few seconds of the best feeling you would ever have in your life”—he is surely summarising his experience of making the film. “Man, that was awesome,” he says.
Adam Poole
3rd August 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
