★★★★

Play it straight. That was always the key. Certainly, it was what made Leslie Neilsen, an erstwhile straight actor, such a gift in the casting of 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, not to mention Airplane before it. Neilsen shot down the barrel as the OG Lt. Frank Drebin and the writing did the rest. Emulation, then, proves an early win in Akiva Schaffer’s remake, which is titled more simply The Naked Gun, with Liam Neeson pitch perfect as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. (‘Love you Daddy’). Right out of the blocks, in an opening swing at Mission: Impossible silliness, Neeson has the brief covered. He’s a stupidly safe pair of hands in a riotously stupid 85 minutes.

Given the sparsity of laugh-out-loud comedies hitting the box office in recent years, it feels inadequate as praise to name Schaffer’s Naked Gun the funniest film of the decade so far. It absolutely is but likely would be still even were the bar not so remedially low. A thick and fast script by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand pummels its gags – a hot pot of wordplay, visual hits and background nonsense – with relentless glee. If a punt misses, who cares? You’re already laughing at the next one. Make no mistake about it, this is tough to get right. Nothing kills a comedy like the expectation of the next laugh going unsatiated. Set too high a bar early on and a breezy offering can quickly feel a cumbersome slog.

Spoofs can rarely rely on a sturdy narrative after all. Here, the plot is dutifully scattershot, rarely makes sense and barely holds attention. It’s a framework, really. A coat hanger for jokes about “Primordial Law of Toughness” devices – gettit? – and room-flooring internal monologues. Lumbered with the shadow of his father’s legacy, Drebin is a force to be reckoned with in the new-style Police Squad. He’s above the law – or, rather, very profoundly not. A wearisome CCH Pounder hawks over him, as Chief Davis, while Danny Huston’s Richard Cane looks every bit the dodgecumber.

When enlisted to investigate the murder of a man crushed to death by an overturned electric car, Drebin’s first move is, of course, to fall for the deceased’s knowingly glamorous sister. This is Beth, a not-completely-true crime novelist, played with vim and vigour by a game Pamela Anderson. She has to be to roll with Drebin’s increasingly idiotic voiceover analyses – from ‘she had a body that carried her head around’ to  ‘a bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown’. Deadpan, dead funny.

As per any legacy offering, Schaffer guides all through a succession of the original’s greatest hits. There’s a wild diversion in which Drebin Jr. and Beth ape Wham, in a Nordic montage that very quickly veers to the Jo Nesbø, and reprisals for the old car carnage routine, this time with added coffee cups. Indeed, the film succeeds more through delivery than originality. There are few jokes here that feel truly, newly conceived – from the old ‘take a chair’ chestnut to a play on UCLA (‘all the time, I live here’) – but the blade cuts no less sharply. A physical skit in silhouette, for instance, is familiar but slays.

It’s by the same token that this new Naked Gun steadfastly refuses to modernise. Sure, there’s a touch of the Taken to the grounded action, although even that’s almost two decades old, but the look and feel of thing remains entirely in the tune of an 80s yesteryear. It’s not just that they don’t make ‘em like this anymore, they don’t even make the ‘em it’s spoofing. Without the incessancy of pop culture relevance, pure throwback reigns.

T.S.