After watching The Housemaid, my wife wanted to watch another movie so we landed on another movie I had on my bucketlist for a while and its just a great option to watch with your partner, I mean comedies for the most part are, we had a good time watching The Housemaid and The Naked Gun (2025) I been sitting on for a while because hoenstly Im not a guy who watch comedies alone, had to be something really special. The first impression often is that reboots usually suck, you know this, I know this, everybody knows this and this was always going to be a tough sell because Leslie Nielsen was one of those actors who had a thing nobody can teach you or copy no matter how hard they try, the guy literally became multiple memes from his action movies, but he is also very funny too. Then you got director Akiva Schaffer is a legit master of parody, mostly from the many years he use to write for SNL I think it was like 5 to 7 years on the grind, and he nails the deadpan without making the whole thing feel like a cheap cash grab or a total letdown for the fans of the OG movie who would have eaten him alive for messing this up. The movie opens with a completely new scene that sets the tone right away for the next eighty five minutes and you can feel pretty fast that the spirit of the original is alive even if the world has changed since the eighties, which was a relief because I really did not want to see another classic get reduced to a nostalgia bait disaster by people who do not understand what makes the original jokes actually work. This is a movie where every background detail matters and the way it drops you into the chaos immediately puts you back in that old school slapstick world where anything can happen and will.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3402138/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
Liam Neeson comes as close as you are going to get to that dry legendary style that made Frank Drebin an icon, and while he is obviously not the original guy he is one of the best possible choices for Frank Jr because he plays the whole thing with complete dead seriousness and that is exactly why the dumb stuff lands so hard. That is the whole secret of the Naked Gun formula and it is harder to pull off than it looks because the second you break character at the audience it all falls apart. Neeson never winks, hee just walks into every catastrophic scene like he is solving a real crime and that commitment is what makes the you lose your mind and start laughting, Im writing and just smiling remembering the movie. The movie builds out a story about Frank Jr trying to stop some global criminal and it is packed with wordplay and huge sight jokes and I bet if you watch this with more than two they would be going absolutely crazy. Then we also got Pamela Anderson as the love interest for this movie, she plays Beth, its hilarious because if you were born during the 80s well you know how hot she use to be, this was something I was not sure about but she has that perfect classic look and her timing with Neeson is actually really solid when things get weird between them. They are both playing it completely straight while the world around them is collapsing in the most ridiculous ways possible and that straight faced chemistry is what makes those scenes work instead of feeling forced. It reminded me of why I used to go out and watch movies before it became so damn expensive, going to the teather was just loud stupid fun without any of the pressure to mean something important.
The whole plot is basically just a redundant cop story which is exactly what this kind of parody should be, nobody is here for story, the story is just a delivery mechanism for the jokes and the jokes come fast one after another to keep the dopamine and laughts going during the entire runtime. I loved that the movie did not leave behind the older crowd because there are dated references to Janet Jackson and the Black Eyed Peas that any fifty year old dad is going to lose it over, but it also throws in electric car cheap shot jokes and other modern stuff for people who might not even know who Frank Drebin was before today. There is a sequence at Cane’s club where Frank and Beth are trying to quietly dig up evidence tying Richard Cane to the larger conspiracy, with Beth keeping him distracted out front while Frank slips into the back to poke around where he absolutely should not be, and naturally everything starts going sideways almost immediately. It was an actual tense scene, its one of those scenes where the movie just keeps escalating the bit past the point where you think it has to stop and then keeps going anyway, what starts as a simple sneak and distract moment, turns into a full blown chain reaction of collisions, failed improvisations, and panic, with every attempt to recover only making the situation worse in exactly the way this series needs. The effects work is a solid mix of practical and digital and the stunts have a weight to them that you do not always get when something is pure CGI; you can feel the chaos has some real physicality to it, I always preffer practical effects over CGI because it does give you that realism, this is why I love 90s movie, those Beverly Hills Cop movies, this matters more than people realize in a comedy like this. The joke lands harder when bodies seem to actually be flying, crashing, and scrambling through a real space instead of a rubbery and that sense of impact gives the whole sequence an extra kick. It is not just funny because the jokes are absurd, it is funny because the scene is built around a clear objective and then delights in wrecking it piece by piece.
Paul Walter Hauser does not get as much to do as I was hoping and that is a bummer because the guy is a comedy gold mine and every time he showed up I wanted more of him, he still delivers some solid moments as the sidekick just trying to survive the wreckage Frank Jr leaves everywhere he goes but I could have watched a whole side plot of just him reacting to things. That is probably the biggest missed opportunity in the whole movie. There are a few spots where a joke drags just too much for my taste but they probably wanted to keep things balance for everyone, there are also moments where a scene feels like it got edited in a hurry but those moments are rare and they do not kill the vibe of the thing. The overall experience is just pure joy, I had a good time but not a great time, this is not like watching Kevin Hart or Dave Chapell on stage, the comedy I like most of the time. This movie still proves you can actually bring a dead franchise back if you hire the right people who care about what made the original work instead of just cashing in on a name, its clear that this movie make things right when it comes to the source material and keep things as close as possible still with that new generation touch.
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