The Naked Gun

The Naked Gun
Director: David Zucker
Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Prisilla Presley, George Kennedy
Released: December 2, 1988

This comedy, starring the late Leslie Neilsen as police officer Frank Drebin who finds out that there is going to be an assassination attempt on the Queen of England who is visiting Los Angeles, is full of jokes, one-liners, and physical gags and definitely made me laugh throughout the movie. Even the commentary is very funny. As you may (or may not) know, O.J. Simpson is in the movie. He plays Nordberg, Frank's partner who spends most of the movie in a coma and getting abused by Frank's antics. When his name shows up in the opening credits, one of the commentators states, "O.J. Simpson's in this? What's he up to now?" (Not sure if the commentary was recorded pre or post him ending up in prison). The first scene you see of O.J. is him sneaking around wearing dark clothes on a marina and holding a gun and one of the commentators says, "Now is this from the movie or is this actual footage?" Funny stuff. They also mentioned that after the whole scandal happened, they got calls from TV stations asking their permission to use clips of O.J. from the movie. Even O.J.'s IMDb page is funny as it has a list of movies he's most well known for. Yeah, something tells me he's more well known for something else...

Prisilla Presley plays Jane, Frank's love interest and there's a really funny montage of them to a hokey song (written specifically for the movie) doing various things like running on a beach, walking in a park and eating hot dogs, sailing, coming out of a movie and laughing (and we see that the movie they just watched was Platoon!),  and a bunch of other things that makes you think this is taking place over a course of a couple weeks. At the end of the montage, they return back to Jane's house and she says something to the effect of, "I had such a wonderful day! I can't believe we just met yesterday!" Very funny payoff to a very funny montage.

My favorite moment in the movie is when Frank is chasing a bad guy and while the bad guy steals a car and gets away, Frank stops a car, gets in the backseat and tells them to "follow that black car!" We then see that in the driver's seat is a student driver and sitting next to her is her instructor. The instructor, in a very monotone voice, tells the driver to lift her arm and extend her middle finger after another driver cusses her out.

I watched the sequels, Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994) and while funny, the first one is the best. The third one features another notorious person who's in the cast: Anna Nicole Smith. She's actually coherent, though so this must have been before she started taking all the drugs. In that movie, Frank finds out that there's going to be a bomb at the Oscars so he attends it and pretends to be Phil Donahue who is presenting with Raquel Welch. I have no idea why Phil Donahue would be at the Oscars, but there's a funny moment when one of the guys in the control room says, "We're never asking Phil Donahue to the Oscars again!" Well, at least they kept their promise!