Airplane! - Another comedy classic from David Zucker?

Thanks to the recent release of the remake/sequel to The Naked Gun starring Liam Neeson, I decided to take the opportunity to give the classic trilogy directed by David Zucker and starring Leslie Nielsen a chance. These films, despite being deeply rooted in an '80s comedy style that simply doesn't exist today, managed to win my heart with clever gags and some of the funniest dialogue I've ever heard on screen.

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Without a doubt, the success of this franchise at the time, as well as its classic status, was a direct consequence of Leslie Nielsen's performance as Lieutenant Frank, a mocking embodiment of all the protagonists in police films and TV series, executed with an unparalleled level of charisma.

However, it's important to acknowledge that if it weren't for Zucker's script and direction, The Naked Gun wouldn't have been half as great as it is. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the rest of his filmography, especially "Airplane!", which is probably his second best-known work.

Released in 1980 (eight years before the story of Lieutenant Frank began on the big screen), Airplane! is a comedy starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Leslie Nielsen himself, who parodies disaster movies. As its name suggests, we follow a plane that must find a way to make an emergency landing after its captain suffers an accident.

This serious premise is nothing more than an excuse for one of the most intelligent parades of exaggeration I've ever seen, so much so that it's shocking that it was made more than 40 years ago.

With such a fast-paced joke-making process that we're likely to miss more than half of it on first viewing, the elements that made me fall in love with The Naked Gun are present in Airplane!, including the sincerity—and seriousness—with which its most absurd jokes are delivered. And while I feel that Nielsen's police satire is funnier than what we see here, I greatly appreciate the sobriety and elegance with which everything is executed here.

It's clear that Airplane! is the product of a time when comedy was treated with much more respect, as a genuine form of art and not as an inferior film genre relegated to empty pop culture references, sustained only by our ability to understand what they were referencing.

It definitely needs a revisit, and I fully understand why many consider it the funniest comedy of all time.

This score was taken from Letterboxd account.