The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

June 10, 2021 9:38 AM

Incompetent police Detective Frank Drebin must foil an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II.

Some bits improved with age - like the constant physical slapstick abuse of OJ Simpson as Nordberg. Other bits did not, such as Randy Newman's terrible song "I Love LA." during the baseball scene. Anyways, it's streaming on Netflix.

posted by Cookiebastard (6 comments total)

This movie came out when I was in grade school. As it made the rounds on cable over the years, first on pay and then on basic, I ate it up. I was already a fan of _Airplane!_, so this was on target. Leslie is a great comedic actor. OJ and George Kennedy and all the other supporting players are great. Ricardo is a lot of fun as Ludwig. And of course Priscilla is wonderful.

Oh the lines as so many things are parodied. "To think, the next time I kill someone, I could be arrested..." is one of my favorites. Some jokes I got right away as a kid, some I have picked up as an adult (the beaver joke for one). One I've never gotten is the ankle bracelet joke when Frank compliments Jane's bracelet and she wonders how it got down there from wherever. Anyone know what that is about?
posted by Fukiyama at 2:08 PM on June 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

The "honey of an ankle bracelet" line is a direct lift from Double Indemnity. I think the joke in Naked Gun is that somehow the anklet fell off of elsewhere and onto her ankle, which is impossible? I think, basically, that it's just not a very good joke and they wanted to reference Double Indemnity and that's what they ended up with. You put 900 jokes in a movie and some of them will fall flat
posted by Cookiebastard at 4:29 PM on June 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ah, cool. I've been watching more Unsolved Mysteries lately and I was thinking about how Leslie, Lloyd, and Robert's careers progressed after Airplane! .
posted by Stuka at 9:01 PM on June 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

The baseball sequence in this film is sufficiently lengthy and joke-packed that MLB Network reruns Naked Gun as one of its "Bleacher Features" alongside more probable titles like Major League.

If you have a friend or family member who's just recently gotten into baseball, this is an extra-fun one to revisit, in fact.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:10 AM on June 11, 2021

Invoking the name of Enrico Pallazzo never fails to put a smile on my face.
posted by detachd at 5:32 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

I watched this repeatedly when I was a kid. The "that's my policy" scene with the mayor (RIP Nancy Marchand) has lived rent free in my head ever since.
posted by metabrilliant at 2:40 PM on July 11, 2021