Naked Gun Reboot Is 'Amiably Ridiculous'

"Nobody in their right mind would reboot The Naked Gun," Johnny Oleksinski writes at the New York Post. "So thank God these filmmakers clearly are not in their right minds." Oleksinski is one of many reviewers praising the comedy reboot, which has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Liam Neeson stars as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., son of Lt. Frank Drebin, Leslie Nielsen's character in the original Naked Gun movies. Pamela Anderson co-stars as his love interest in a plot that spoofs '80s LA action movies.

• "Like Nielsen, he delivers his dialogue with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds its lunacy," Robbie Collin writes at the Telegraph. "If the Taken star's past decade of throwaway action roles achieved nothing else, they at least equipped him with exactly the sort of no-nonsense screen persona required to sell some of the most unapologetically all-nonsense material to be seen since the early 1990s." Collin says that with a joke in almost every line of the script, you'd be "laughing more or less continuously through to the credits" even if the hit rate was only one in five—and for him, it was considerably higher.

• "In the spirit of the 1988 classic, director Akiva Schaffer's movie carpet-bombs us with nonstop jokes—from stupid to clever to utterly deranged. They never, ever let up," Oleksinski writes at the Post. Anderson, he writes, not only plays up "her old Baywatch persona to embody a noir femme fatale—she goes fully bananas."
• Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune delivered one of the more lukewarm reviews. "It's not bad," he writes, but his criticisms include a reliance on "lazy, hyperviolent action tropes," which he suspects is connected to producer Seth McFarlane of Family Guy, and the "comedy misjudgement" of devoting too much of its 85 minutes to Danny Huston as "an Elon Muskian tech entrepreneur intent on taking over the world."
• Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian describes the movie as "amiably ridiculous, refreshingly shallow, entirely pointless, and guilelessly crass." "There is no reason for this new Naked Gun to exist other than the reason for the old ones: it's a laugh, disposable, forgettable, enjoyable," he writes.