Directed by: David Zucker
Starring: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, OJ Simpson, George Kennedy
The comedy team that brought you Airplane! (1980) and the short-lived series Police Squad! brings us The Naked Gun. All three projects starred Leslie Nielsen, who had a gift for delivering one-liners with a stone face and maintaining unflappability in the face of comic chaos. Nielsen's best comic performances came when he seemed dropped in from another drama filming nearby. There was one comedy Nielsen starred in (which I'm sure very few people besides me saw) called Repossessed, a "sequel" of sorts to The Exorcist played for laughs and found very few of them. One of the movie's problems (of which there were myriad), was Nielsen desperately trying to create laughs by delivering lines in a funny accent or making faces at the screen. He was trying much too hard to be funny, and the results suffered.
Nielsen plays Lt. Frank Drebin, who at the beginning of the film thwarts a plot in the Middle East by America's enemies and returns home to an enthusiastic welcome...for "Weird Al" Yankovic, who arrived on a nearby plane. The unexpected falls from the sky in these movies. We are assaulted by sight gags, puns, one-liners, and bathroom humor if needed, and we are barely able to catch our breath. Most of the jokes work, some bomb, and there's a plot in there somewhere also, which involves billionaire Vincent Ludwig (Montalban), who hatches a plot to assassinate the queen of England at an Angels baseball game. Reggie Jackson, who played for the Angels in the twilight of a Hall of Fame career, is involved as a would-be assassin.
Drebin stumbles onto the plot and then mucks up everything before somehow foiling it at the last minute. Some of the funniest moments arise because of the crude behavior exhibited around the queen as she sits in her royal box. (There's a guy sitting in the wrong seat, someone screams "kick him in the balls", you name it) All the while, Drebin doesn't seem to realize he's in a comedy, and that makes him even funnier. The gags fly at you from all angles, and you find yourself almost ducking.
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