The Naked Gun (2025)

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston

Have I Seen It Before: Nope! Might have seen it in theaters, but time is finite, and certain movies only play at certain theaters. Such is life. Really looked forward to it showing up on Paramount +, though.

Yes, I am ashamed.

Did I Like It: Great comedies surprise you. So, maybe, The Naked Gun isn’t that great. I think any film that dusts off the now ancient joke of lowering a Spirit Halloween sign on a place recently closed is content with somewhat limited ambitions.

Truly awful comedies tend to give you all of their best bits in trailers and clips, hoping that they can paper over deficiencies in hopes of a better-than-expected opening weekend. The OJ joke? It’s there*. The bit with the chili dogs? Check. I even tripped over a clip of an truly odd sequence where Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson) is absolutely inconsolable after Beth (Anderson) accidentally re-connects his TiVo to the internet, thereby expiring a cache of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. I really would have like to come into that bit cold.

And yet, I kind of enjoyed it.

Maybe I was able to be aware that throughout the film I was laughing about as much as I did throughout any of the three Leslie Nielsen-starring original films. Judged by its own standards, this new Naked Gun doesn’t feel like an ill-considered notion, and it entertains plenty. That might have something to do with Neeson in the main role. Like the 1980s rehabilitation of Nielsen from respectable leading-man to the goofiest man who ever lived, bringing the late-stage Neeson action persona into a goofy comedy works. At some point, Ed Helms circled the leading role, and he would have been dreadful, coming originally from comedy as he did. One might yearn for a Jon Hamm, but we already know he’s funny. Let Neeson have his turn.

*Credit where credit is due that they didn’t keep going back to that well, and I might have forgiven them if they had.

Fade to Black (2006)

Director: Oliver Parker

Cast: Danny Huston, Diego Luna, Paz Vega, Christopher Walken

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I think film land would forgive me for blanching at imaginary tales featuring a fictional Orson Welles (Huston). One does not want to pollute the reservoir.

Did I Like It:  I’m going to be the wrong audience for this film, right? It’s kind of like a magician trying to do tricks for another magician. This actually does happen in this film, and the notion that Welles would be flummoxed by anyone attempting slight of hand in front of him was something I wouldn’t have done… because it’s ridiculous. This goes double for the moment where he discusses “self-esteem” with another character. I’m not entirely sure anyone ever used the term “self-esteem” before 1975, and I have a real problem with Welles being concerned with it at all in 1947.

On spec, Danny Huston feels like the wrong casting for Orson, and I’m struck by how badly cast he is as the film unfurls. Can anyone—let’s put me aside for a moment—not look at Mr. Huston and think he not only doesn’t look or sound a bit like Welles, but instead is a dead ringer for his father—and Welles contemporary and leading man in The Other Side of the Wind (2018)— John Huston. There are plenty of actors who have portrayed Welles who didn’t quite fit the bill of the man, but none of them are a dead-ringer for another iconoclastic filmmaker of the time.

Also, the notion that he started to get fat only because Rita Hayworth left him? It’s the kind of pat thing that makes an idea like Rosebud the last thing anyone discusses when talking about Citizen Kane (1941).

So, yes. I have some notes.

Let’s try to look at the film objectively, as if I were not me, and the subject matter of this film was any other subject matter. The film is shot with all of the bland panache of a made-for-cable-movie which would be forgotten virtually the instant the next block of programming takes over. The murder mystery story is utterly pedestrian, and I don’t care a bit when the murderer is revealed. Sequences that place Welles in the middle of post-war Italy have a certain verisimilitude, and I think that may be the most damnable faint praise I can offer the film: it works best when Welles and its genre trappings are incidental to the proceedings.