Going Great Guns

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

Written by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams,

David Zucker and Pat Proft

Directed by David Zucker

At the USA Harvard Square

THE inevitable question about The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! has to be: Is it as funny as Airplane! (which also came from the writing/production team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Robert Weiss)? The answer is a qualified yes. At best, The Naked Gun has Airplane!'s same irreverent looniness characterized by sight gags and puns. But it's a smaller project, not so much a movie as a long episode of the 1982 TV series Police Squad! on which it is based.

Airplane! alumnus Leslie Nielsen plays Lieutenant Drebin, who sets out in the tried and true cop show quest: avenging the attempted murder of his partner. The first half hour of the film is inspired, from the hilarious credit sequence to Nielsen's first scene, in which he foils an anti-American plot by some of America's most notorious enemies such as Muammar Khaddafi and Idi Amin. The attempted killing of Nielsen's partner (O.J. Simpson) is a slapstick tour-de-force.

Like Airplane!, Naked Gun turns everything into a gag. Drebin can't park his car or pick up a pen without something calamitous happening. Many of the gags, in fact, are obvious, but that's part of the film's charm; the movie operates on bringing out the silliness of the rote plots and personalities that characterize endless episodes of TV cop shows.

Naked Gun's script thrives on the same groaner puns and absurd hyperbole that distinguished Airplane! When the movie's villain, played with oily elegance by Ricardo Montalban, offers Nielsen a cigar he says, "Cuban?" "No," replies Nielsen, "I'm Dutch-Irish." Montalban's dignified demeanor is a perfect foil to Nielsen's hapless bumbling.

Priscilla Presley plays Montalban's innocent assistant, whom Drebin describes as having "the kind of legs you'd like to suck on," and is appropriately appealing as Nielsen's love interest.

THE movie spoofs everything possible. The hospital is called "Our Lady of the Worthless Miracles." Condoms are called "Titans" (not Trojans) and are slightly larger than usual. And while some film comedies are content to have someone note that the food in their refrigerator is so old it could walk on its own, in Naked Gun, the food actually does make its way across the top of a refrigerator. But since the movie is spoofing TV rather than the movies, it lacks the more ambitious structure and plot that the Airport movies provided for Airplane!.

It also lacks the constant background patter of jokes that kept Airplane! going. There is a good deal of homophobic nastiness--the bad guy is gay, of course--and the occasional bathroom humor makes for some of the film's least appealing moments. Naked Gun's endless gags become more and more tedious, and the movie starts to fall apart during an incredibly long baseball sequence near the end. The threadbare plot, flimsy as it is, actually manages to bog the film down.

Luckily, Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker had the good sense to end the movie when it starts to wind down. It was reduced in test screenings from 105 to 85 minutes and is still a bit drawn out. Naked Gun is no epic and does not claim to be one. It's not quite Airplane!, but it still flies.