Review of ‘The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!’ (David Zucker, 1988)

‘The Naked Gun’ works in spite of itself as a series of gags, parodies, slapstick comedy and cheesy jokes that are not always well integrated but which, like a Ken Dodd comedy routine, are relentless in their cheesiness and simplicity. Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan delivery, in which he keeps a straight face while speaking outlandish lines, makes this a comic goldmine in which a succession of cameos from the likes of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and O.J. Simpson make for irresistible comedy.

Nielsen finds himself in unexpected action hero mode in the opening scene, as his Frank Drebin accidentally appears at a summit of all the communist and terrorist world leaders who are a threat to America, including Gaddafi, Gorbachev and the Ayatollah, and manages to single-handedly eradicate each one of them, only then when he returns home a hero does he have to take second fiddle to ‘Weird Al’ who happens to be travelling on the same plane. Back in Los Angeles, Drebin is involved in the operation to look after Queen Elizabeth II on a state visit to the US, and of course he ends up gatecrashing and causing carnage at every turn, even sliding down a long table on top of her, in the eyes of the world’s press, at a banquet in her honour.

The humour comes from the fact that like Peter Sellers’s Chance Gardiner in ‘Being There’, Drebin is really a dimwit who finds himself saving the world not out of any sense of skill or professionalism but because he has sleepwalked into a dangerous situation and makes it up as he goes along, impersonating opera singers or football umpires in the pursuit of his detective work. The plot such as it is really functions as a series of comic set pieces and it is mercifully short, checking in at less than 90 minutes, which is about all this extended TV homage, based on the 80s ‘Police Squad’ sketches, can last before it starts to wear out its welcome.