I can't tell who the sexy octopus is
dir: Akiva Schaffer
2025
I was a fool to think that just because some people said this was funny, that I would find it funny. ‘Funny’ is more subjective than beauty, sleaze or profundity. Cuteness, hotness, cringe – now they’re universal.
There’s also the factor that seeing something on your own is never the same experience as watching something funny with other people. The collective energy makes a big difference. The involuntary, unconscious group dynamics can take you out of yourself and deliver you a very different experience. Duh, I know you’re thinking, no shit, Sherlock.
I didn’t have the luxury of watching this flick in a cinema. And no-one else at my place was awake to watch this with. So alone I trudged through this relatively brisk 85 minute movie, not laughing at what I am told is a steady stream of gags in the style of the classic Zucker – Abrams – Zucker movies like Kentucky Fried Movie, Flying High, Top Secret, Hot Shots and all those other pieces of shit, including the original Naked Gun movies with Leslie Nielsen.
Nah, that’s not fair, I take that back. I laughed at plenty of those when I was a child. I’ll laugh at anything. Finding stuff funny isn’t some elitist, rarefied pursuit like fox hunting or snorting caviar. Everyone laughs at fart jokes. Not all fart jokes, but the right ones, the most unexpected?
I laughed at some stuff here. Just not that often.
This was less like watching a modern version of those specific films from the past, and more like watching a couple of episodes of Family Guy back to back. I’ve seen plenty of episodes of that animated show, and I probably chuckled a few times, but it’s pretty mediocre in the scheme of things. The New Naked Gun does benefit from having Liam Neeson in the lead role, because you don’t expect him to be funny, and when he is, it’s surprising! I’ve seen him be funny in things (intentionally), including guest roles in The Simpsons and in Derry Girls, and in some other cameos here or there. But putting the whole flick on his massive shoulders, well, now that’s risky.
And I was pleasantly surprised by Pamela Anderson, who I’ve never seen be good or funny in anything. She’s a good sport here and does some stuff that made me cackle. My second favourite thing involved her trying to distract some guards at a nightclub, and she decides to sing, and it’s this horrible atonal bebop jazz scat stuff.
I did chuckle, maybe even chortled. Out loud. To myself. Then felt ashamed.
No, really, that’s not what happened. There was no shame involved, although there were some horrifying scenes that I could not believe were in this movie. As in, I have no illusions that they were ever not dumb film comedies. That’s not a criticism, in that films like this have to have a certain dumbness to them. You can’t craft a sophisticated fart joke. This style of humour depends on scripting that needs people to be exceedingly literal or extremely gullible to work. And double entendre stuff, like something out of a Carry On Up the Khyber Pass, with jokes so old and creaky you feel them in your bones.
But there’s no excuse for the simulated bestiality gags. That was… horrifying to me. I mean, I wasn’t expecting the wit of Jane Austen here or the poetry of Audre Lorde, but it was still even dumber than I’d mostly imagined it could be. I didn’t really have hopes that high to begin with, seeing as I think a lot of people have forgotten how hit and miss the original flick was.
Having a woman up a step-ladder, with Leslie Nielsen beneath saying “Nice beaver!” in an approving fashion, and then have Priscilla Presley bring down a taxidermied beaver and say “Thanks! I just had it stuffed” was as funny as the original movies got.
That and physically assaulting the queen, that was about it.
Although one point in this flick’s favour is that it doesn’t have multiple murderer OJ Simpson in any lead role, though it did have a very fun gag at his expense. The Drebin that Neeson plays here kneels in obeisance to a photo of his father (Leslie Nielsen), as does every other cop character, including Paul Walter Hauser, kneeling to a photo of the great George Kennedy, as Ed Hocken Jnr. When they get to the photo of OJ, the African-American cop instead of crying, looks directly into the camera and shakes his head side to side, as if to say “no, we’re not even going there”.
And yet they gave that guy absolutely nothing else worthwhile to do in the rest of the film. I guess they were too busy trying to do more interminable coffee cup jokes, or give Danny Huston more time to do nothing that wasn’t lifted from other flicks that lifted their premise from the worst of the James Bond flicks. I read people online rampaging that the flick had lifted its villain’s plans from the deeply shitty Kingsmen movies, and I thought “have you even seen any movies from before the 2000s?”
Yeah, this isn’t a flick I’d be taking the who family to, fun for the whole family. There’s a bizarre interlude where Neeson and Anderson go off to spend time kanoodling in a cabin, and for what ever demented reason decide to conjure up a sentient snowman with what to have threesomes with.
The snowman gets jealous, and well murder was obviously the only solution to that problem.
And then back to our regular programming, which involves a tech billionaire killing people with his bad electric cars, in between planning to kill almost everyone, but intends to survive a manufactured apocalypse in a vault with Weird Al Yankovic coming along in order to entertain the other rich fucks, and the only person who can stop this dastardly scheme is apparently Frank Drebin Junior, who can’t even go that long without soiling himself due to his unholy love of chili dogs.
Throw away, throwaway gags like that. Look, I haven’t been stoned in decades, but I imagine this flick isn’t one that would be funnier in that state. Maybe if I’d been drunk I’d have found it funnier, Maybe meth or crack is really the way a film like this would reach peak enjoyment.
I really like Liam Neeson, don’t get me wrong. I found him way more enjoyable in this than I’ve found him in his last 10 films where he pretends to be able to beat up people forty years younger than him. He’s somewhat of a perfect or perfectly awkward fit for this demented “straight” character, who’s a piss-take of Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan manner, which was itself a piss-take of the Joe Friday Dragnet character from… way before I was born. He’s fine and I’m glad he and Anderson have found love late in (his) life. He’s in his 70s, for fuck’s sake, and they actually work well together in their scenes (or at least not the horrifying scenes I referred to earlier), which is great, thanks.
But overall the flick didn’t entirely work for me. I tired of Family GuyThe Naked Gun
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