When Frank Drebin Jr. saves the day, what is actually being saved?
Back when I was an impressionable elementary schooler, I saw the first Michael Bay Transformers film with my dad, and I remember being struck that this time around, the robot that turned into a police car is evil. The men and women in blue uniforms and caps who drive cars with sirens have fallen from the heroic status they held in the 20th century, and we now focus not on the uniforms or the cars, but on the guns they have on their belts, and the wide variety of ways they know how to kill people. As such, the very idea of the original Naked Gun trilogy, and the Police Squad show before it, feels like something out of an allegedly more innocent time (although the likes of Bull Connor would probably disagree), a quainter, more naive time.
When the decision was made to make The Naked Gun for release in 2025, it was to be made and released in a country that has had massive unrest over police violence. More and more Americans do not look up to cops, but fear them. As such, to portray the police as the heroes in a spoof movie will read differently than when Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker made the original Police Squad show.
To get the most pressing question out of the way: this movie is hysterically funny. It’s very much a modernized version of those old spoof movies where, if you don’t like one joke, the writers are banking on the prospect you may like one of the four other jokes occurring within the next minute. It’s that density of comedy that really saves the original trilogy for a modern viewer, as perhaps one in five jokes (and frankly that is being charitable) are hideously offensive by modern standards (one particular reveal in the third movie taking the crown for single most offensive joke in the franchise). There is a series of gags involving an infrared camera that, while not particularly offensive to anyone, are possibly raunchier than anything in the original trilogy. That density is preserved here, as the film is crammed with funny background events and a conga line’s worth of one-liners.
Liam Neeson is doing a Leslie Nielsen impersonation through all of this, and he is very good at it. What made Nielsen so good in his role as Frank Drebin Sr. was that he was capable of saying, and responding to, completely absurd horseshit with a completely straight face. Neeson is very similar, capable of making absurd Sex and the City references or questioning the use of a certain slur in an old song in a manner that sounds very earnest. Neeson sells Frank Drebin Jr. as a man who has no idea that what he’s saying is complete nonsense. In the younger Drebin’s mind, his responses are perfectly rational, and he is the rational man in an irrational world.
The basics of the plot are ripped from 2014’s Kingsman: the Secret Service, involving a sonic frequency that makes people kill each other. The villains here are what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor described as ‘end times fascists,’ wishing to see an end to human civilization so that they can make a new world atop its ashes. They feel like Musk- or Thiel-style technofascists, a clear departure from the villains in the original trilogy, whose aims were far more down-to-earth, relatively speaking. Since we live in a world that feels like it’s careening ever quicker into a dystopian future, this movie is the first time that the series gets openly science fictional.
That swerve into science fiction is one way that this film shows its origins in this century; a subtle shift in the characterization of Frank Drebin, and by extension Police Squad as a whole, is another. In addition to thinking that the completely ridiculous is completely normal, Neeson’s Drebin is portrayed as a violent asshole, going by several of the jokes. When he urgently needs to use the restroom, he fires a gun at the ceiling to get a crowd out of the way between him and a toilet in a coffee shop. Before doing that, he let a speeding driver get away with a warning. This Drebin is actively destructive to human life and property in a way that Nielsen's Drebin never was. He is, if not racist in his heart of hearts, happy to admit that his violence disproportionately affects people of color. One particularly memorable background gag in Police Squad headquarters has an officer escorting away some crying children while he holds their confiscated lemonade stand around his arm. The question eventually has to be asked: does Police Squad do anything other than terrorize innocent people?
It’s subtle, and easy to miss given the rapid-fire comedy, but this film portrays Police Squad as at best completely useless, and is very aware of the myriad problems of contemporary policing. Police Squad is filled with cowboy cops—the sort of cowboys that massacred Natives. I’m reminded of Peter Moskos’s book Cop in the Hood, his memoir of taking a job with the Baltimore police department to do anthropological work on policing. He says that most cops that he knew were not committed racists; the violence they meted out affected Black people disproportionately because of the broader structural inequalities of American society rather than any particular animus as individuals. But it’s not intent, but impact, that matters, and these cops, Frank Drebin Jr. foremost among them, are terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles like the imperial enforcers from which American police have drawn so much. They rampage around the city with impunity (for them, punishment for police misconduct warrants a pool party) and have brought the war home. In another world, Frank Drebin Jr. could be a particularly dim-witted officer of the Philippine Constabulary, brutalizing a people white Americans called the n-word. It was a service that attracted brutes, and this version of Police Squad acts that way.
[An aside—if you want to read more about imperial influence on policing, I recommend Julian Go's Policing Empire, Matthew Guariglia's Police and the Empire City, Alfred McCoy's Policing America's Empire, and Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop.]
Frank Drebin Jr. ultimately saves the day, as he was bound to do, fighting the villain outside of Ponzischeme.com Arena. It is telling that the only dangerous crime anyone actually stops in this movie is one that threatens the interests of the rich and powerful. He does so with the cooperation of his love interest, who makes up fictional stories and sells them as true crime, thereby saving Police Squad’s funding, after the Spirit Halloween banner had already been hung up on its building. Earlier in the film, it is shown that Police Squad is rank with nepotism, where the son of Nordberg (portrayed in the original trilogy by O. J. Simpson) is heavily implied to have committed crimes similar to that of his actor. The whole enterprise, the whole concept of policing, and indeed contemporary American society are all immersed in a slimy morass of corruption and theft.
Police abolitionists argue that policing, as an institution, does not solve crime, nor prevent crime, but rather punishes crime, to the detriment of the aforementioned. They often insist on referring to the American legal system, rather than the American justice system, as it is designed to execute laws rather than to pursue any real form of justice. Looking at the movie from this lens, the ultimate joke of The Naked Gun is justice in America, and the punchline is: “Justice? What justice?”
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
