Naked Gun 33 1/3 is a Dim Shadow of an Essential Original
The short-lived but much loved and much missed cult television show Police Squad! and the even more revered 1988 hit Naked Gun were the product of the writing and directing team popularly known as ZAZ (for Zucker Abrahams Zucker) or the Zucker Brothers.
1994’s Naked Gun 33 1/3 isn’t a ZAZ movie or a film by the Zucker Brothers. The only member of the trio with a writing or directing credit is David Zucker. Unfortunately, David Zucker is the Zucker Brother who made a hard shift right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and devoted the ensuing years to fusing bad comedy with even worse politics.
David Zucker made An American Carol, the strangely dour would-be satire about how Michael Moore hates America but loves eating giant sandwiches and all Republicans are patriotic, God-fearing true Americans.
The Top Secret! writer-director was not yet a loud and proud Republican when he co-wrote Naked Gun 33 1/3 with longtime ZAZ collaborator Pat Proft, whose resume includes all-time classics like Naked Gun and Real Genius as well as the Star Wars Holiday Special, and Baseketball and High School High co-writer Robert LoCash.
The script’s casual racism and the exhausting number of jokes predicated on black people being criminals and Los Angeles being a contemporary Sodom & Gomorrah nevertheless have an unmistakably reactionary quality.
I had mercifully forgotten, but Naked Gun 33 1/3 contains the second ragingly transphobic parody of The Crying Game’s infamous reveal in the two months I’ve been writing this column.
Ace Ventura is notorious for its transphobia, and the climactic scene where a massive group of men all become violently ill upon discovering that someone they thought was born a woman had a penis.
Naked Gun 33 1/3 isn’t as involved or elaborate in its transphobia but a scene where Leslie Nielsen discovers that a sexy gangster moll played by Anna Nicole Smith (who we last saw just last week in The Hudsucker Proxy) has a penis and is suddenly overcome with a need to vomit profusely out of literal stomach-churning disgust and horror.
This lesser sequel has aged terribly due to a preponderance of references that were dated at the time of its release and now feel ancient, but also because two of the supporting players in this wacky, lowbrow comedy are now synonymous with tragedy.
Anna Nicole Smith made the most of her fifteen minutes of fame with a successful modeling and reality television career and a much less successful career as an actress.
1994 represented the height of her cinematic fame, when she scored a small but flashy role as the gold-digging sexpot girlfriend of the dopey title character in the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy and a more substantial role as the hot-to-trot girlfriend of heavy Rocco (Fred Ward) here.
In her brief, dramatic life, Anna Nicole Smith was a larger-than-life caricature of the ultimate blonde sex bomb. So, she was ideally suited for roles that only called for her to be sober, remember her lines, and be sexy.
The other actor now better known for their unfortunate private life than their film career is O.J Simpson, who plays Nordberg, a bumbling, accident-prone colleague of Nielsen’s Frank Drebin. Nordberg constantly hurts himself through flagrant incompetence, but he’s also a dim-witted mouth-breather, not unlike Chevy Chase’s portrayal of Gerald Ford.
I smiled a few times during Naked Gun 33 1/3, but I don’t know that I ever laughed out loud. I re-watched the original Naked Gun recently for a thirty-fiveth anniversary piece for Fatherly, and it really holds up.
Naked Gun had one hilarious set piece after another. It was effortlessly funny, whereas its second sequel worked up a sweat trying and failing to get laughs out of randomness and what worked before. Then there are parodies that inspire groans instead of laughter.
I had forgotten, for example, that much of the film is devoted to a DOA Thelma and Louise parody that finds Priscilla Presley’s Jane Spencer heading out on the road with a feminist, man-hating friend played by Little Shop of Horrors’ Ellen Greene.
It’s an unfortunate film to parody in part because doing so requires putting an ostensibly comic spin on the scene where Geena Davis’ character is nearly sexually assaulted before her attacker’s violent demise.
In one scene, Jane sits behind a steering wheel that is at least three sizes too big. Hack comedy has long held that oversized is automatically funny. So, while a normal-sized steering wheel would amuse no one, a steering wheel that’s much too large is an automatic gut-buster.
Naked Gun 33 1/3 finds Frank retired from the force and bored out of his mind. Frank’s wife Jane wants children but he’s a dud when it comes to bedroom gymnastics. He’s clearly more interested in his old job than in filling his hopeful wife’s womb with his life-giving seed.
Frank gets his chance when his colleagues, who have conveniently forgotten what an incompetent boob he is, convince him to go undercover as a convict to get closer to incarcerated bomber Rocco Dillon (Ward).
Is there a joke in which Frank makes the mistake of dropping the soap in the prison shower and must use ingenuity to keep from being violently sodomized? It brings me no joy to report that yes, Naked Gun 33 1/3 features exactly that kind of exhausted, brutally unfunny gay panic joke.
Naked Gun 33 1/3 gets off to a start that’s not particularly promising but is okay. It almost feels like the sequel is the product of an AI prompt like, “Zucker Brothers-style spoof comedy starring Leslie Nielsen” and then five minutes later it offered up this lazy mediocrity.
This is a quintessential instance of a sequel of offering more of the same and that same feeling less and less entertaining or necessary.
By this point the series had become disconcertingly broad and hammy. In scene after scene a character, generally Frank, will say something wacky in what can very generously be deemed joke form. This causes whoever he’s talking to look surprised and concerned because what he is saying is, in fact, very silly and ridiculous, and impossible to take seriously.
It’s the film’s way of clumsily underlining and highlighting every tired gag so that the audience doesn’t miss a single exhausted joke. It’s hack but it also takes us out of the reality of the film, cartoonish as it might be, because the supporting characters doing a more subdued form of a double take are acting as our surrogates and responding as if they’re jokes in a movie and not anything anyone might say in real life.
Naked Gun 33/3’s third act is dominated by a climactic sequence at the Academy Awards, in which Frank must find a bomb before it detonates and spends much of the night impersonating Phil Donahue.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a thin, unsatisfying variation of Naked Gun’s climax.
In Naked Gun Frank similarly bumbles his way through an exceedingly public event where he must impersonate someone prominent in order to stop a crime in an affair full of celebrities.
Only the first time around it was at a California Angels game where he had to keep Reggie Jackson from killing the Queen. That set-piece was inspired. Naked Gun 33 1/3’s third act, however, feels like the product of Madlibs or Clue.
This anti-climatic climax, which is notable primarily for its transphobia, just inspires nostalgia and longing for the first entry in what never should have become a trilogy.
My memories of Naked Gun 33/13 are fuzzy and not terribly positive. I have a soft spot for Zucker Brothers-style parody films, and while Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams have Executive Producer credits here, the movie feels less like the real thing than a dim imitation of the ZAZ house style.
Time has done Naked Gun 33 1/3 no favors but it was a dodgy proposition at the time of its release as well. It’s a typical second sequel and that is not a good at all.
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