THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD!
Directed by David Zucker; Screenplay by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Pat Proft
LA.P.D. Detective Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) smells trouble. And gets it. Thugs drill him with lead, he gets wet paint on his jacket, a bear trap snaps on his leg, and a window slams down on his fingertips. Nordberg’s partner, Lieut. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), solemnly swears revenge. But before he has * brought the evil Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) to justice, Drebin must do business with a killer fish, a body-stocking condom, a ballplaying assassin (Reggie Jackson) and the Queen of England. As Frank could tell you, it’s the same old story: “Boy finds girl. Boy loses girl. Girl finds boy. Boy forgets girl. Boy remembers girl. Girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.”
From the opening credits (a police car’s siren light cruises down a street, onto the sidewalk, into a house, through a girls’ shower room) to the closing crawl (which confides, “In case of tornado, southwest corner of basement”), The Naked Gun is a picture in thrall to its own silliness. Three of the film’s perpetrators, the ZAZ team, spoofed ’70s disaster epics in Airplane! and spy movies in Top Secret! Now they have stolen from themselves, extending their 1982 TV series Police Squad! to feature length. The stretch marks show, in a plethora of chase scenes and bathroom humor that makes The Naked Gun seem like Police Academy with a brain. Well, maybe three brains. Like the ZAZ lads’ other films, this is a movie made for a VCR Saturday night. They supply the jokes; you bring the microwave popcorn and modest expectations.
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