Naked Gun reboot is a true masterclass in buffoonery

Writer/director Akiva Schaffer nails mile-a-minute patter of sight gags and puns in Liam Neeson revival, but ‘The Legend of Ochi’ could be a lot weirder, writes Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

★★★★☆

In a fake public service announcement released alongside the revival of the classic Leslie Nielsen spoof franchise The Naked Gun, new star Liam Neeson begs us to take pity on the poor, endangered studio comedy. There are fewer now than ever before, and their decimation is robbing us of the precious opportunity to “share a smile, a laugh, and even the occasional groan with the people in [our] very own community”, he explains.

The Naked Gun, then, is the genre's last stand. It's a callback to one of the funniest trios to have ever operated - brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, aka ZAZ, who were also behind the spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) and the disaster movie spoof Airplane! (1980), the latter frequently cited as the funniest film ever made - and directed and co-written by Akiva Schaffer, one-third of ZAZ's closest successors, The Lonely Island.

Though Schaffer, alongside his regular collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, is best known for The Lonely Island's string of Saturday Night Live parody songs (among them “Dick in a Box”, “I’m on a Boat” and “I Just Had Sex”), the trio were also behind one of the most underrated comedies of the 21st century, 2016's Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which giddily tore into the kind of self-produced, self-mythologising musician doc that's since only increased in popularity.

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