New City, Same Squad

Going into this first The Naked Gun sequel, I felt no small amount of dread. While I absolutely loved the Police Squad! episodes, and know that the Zucker-Abrahms-Zucker guys have cranked out good work, it is also true that frequently when comedians lose their touch they have a hard time getting it back. Reusing material, hitting jokes they’ve beaten to death already, and not knowing what people find funny anymore tend to become symptoms of a larger problem: the comedians just don’t have what it takes anymore. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! seemed like just that kind of precipice, the moment where the very funny guys stop being quite so funny.

I’m not going to say that The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear redeems the group entirely. In comparison to their earliest works, like Airplane! and Police Squad!, this sequel still feels watered down and a little limp when it comes to the comedy. It can’t help but feel like a copy of a copy, the same material reused again and again when, instead, we would have liked to see something new from the group. With that said, it is at least a little funnier than the first film, finding a bit more humor from its story and setup. It’s not great, but I’ll take any improvement when I have to sit through a bunch of these films in a series.

The sequel finds Lt. Detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) White House, getting honored for being a good cop and a good detective (having just killed his one thousandth drug dealer). There he meets the heads of the coal, nuclear, and petroleum industries along with Dr. Albert S. Meinheimer (Richard Griffiths), the White House’s consultant on the environment. While Drebin bumbles around and constantly, accidentally beats up First Lady Barbara Bush (Margery Ross), the energy magnates plot and scheme about the President’s upcoming energy policy. It seems that Meinheimer is likely to suggest green energy, not coal, gas, and nuclear, and these guys just can’t let that stand.

Later that night, someone tries to assassinate Meinheimer. It doesn’t go to plan, and Meinheimer survives, but it does bring Frank back into contact with Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley), Meinheimer’s PR rep, as well as Frank’s former fiance. Jane left Frank at the altar, and he’s been desperate to get her back ever since. Unfortunately, Jane is now with Hexagon Oil owner Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet), and she seems happy to have moved on. Frank has a chance to get Jane back, though, since Hapsburg was behind the attempted Meinheimer assassination, and he very much wants to see the green energy policy fail. All Frank has to do is put the pieces together and solve the case…

In many ways The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear feels like a retread of Police Squad! This isn’t just because it has the same style of humor, which would be fine, but also because it reuses a lot of the same jokes (including, word for word, the “is this some kind of bust?” gag). I get that this is a sequel and the comedians wanted some sense of continuity, but it does feel like the old material is pretty heavy in this film and jokes are less funny each time they’re reused.

With that said, the film does have a lot of new gags that work pretty well. There’s a car chase in the middle of the film that’s both elaborate and leads to a lot of solid gags at O.J. Simpson’s expense (which is never a bad thing). There are a few solid gags when Frank and Jane are around each other (including a fairly solid sequence at her fridge). And any time the guys have to do an actual investigation at a crime scene, the foreground and background gags fly fast and heavy. These are the kinds of moments you look for in one of these films, with everything getting more and more elaborate and the film never calling it out at all.

To that end, the two leads, Nielsen and Presley, absolutely kill it when it comes to straight-faced delivery. It doesn’t feel like Nielsen does nearly as much mugging for the camera this time around, instead relying on the more subtle reaction shots to sell the humor. There are plenty of times where he’s up to something crazy but he plays it stone-faced, which only makes the humor even better (such as the mariachi sequence late in the film). He’s complimented by Presley who does just as solid a job. One sequence, where the two have to have an important and serious conversation while they do an elaborate and silly dance stands out to me. I have no clue how they could do any of that with a straight face, but they did.

The weakness of the film comes from the fact that, once again, there really isn’t much story here. It’s revealed early on that Hapsburg is a scenery-chewing, mustache-twirling villain which undercuts the two main plots of the story. On the one hand, we already know who the villain is very early on, so there isn’t any mystery to the case. In fact, there’s little in the way of real investigation work (and seeing the cops do investigations usually leads to the best gags), and the whole of the actual case could be handled in fifteen minutes of footage. It’s hard to get invested in a story like this when there’s so little meat to it.

Having Hapsburg as the obvious, underlined villain also undercuts the love story between Frank and Jane. For that story to work best you want there to be conflict. Does she love Hapsburg or will she choose Frank. Hapsburg being the villain, though, means that we already know Jane is going to choose Frank in the end because the movie isn’t going to have her choose the villain. That’s just not how it works in these kinds of stories. Especially not with this kind of writing. Better, deeper character development would make these plotlines work even better.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask for these films to give us a bit more in the way of story and character development. Bear in mind part of the reason why Airplane! worked so well was because it was a gag-a-minute comedy layered over a completely straight-laced drama. That original film, Zero Hour!, had plot and story and characters and the gags were added later. You can have both and, I think, it makes the comedy even better. The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear doesn’t have that balance. It’s a comedy film written with the gags in mind first, the story and characters second, and it makes for a weaker viewing experience overall.

I enjoyed The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear far more than the first film, but that doesn’t actually make it a good movie. It’s better than what came before, but I still feel like there’s a lot missing that would have made this a better, funnier, and more complete viewing experience. This film still doesn’t shake my opinion that Frank Drebin and Co. worked better in episodic, 25-minute form. Bringing them to the big screen, and giving them more time to bumble through a case doesn’t mean there will be more jokes. Quite the opposite. Instead we get the same level of humor, watered down and stretched out to fill a longer runtime. I don’t think it’s impossible to make a good The Naked Gun film. I just don’t think ZAZ nailed it in either of these two movies so far.