New & now: The Naked Gun & Weapons

Folks, I love a good juxtaposition. I watched Santa Buddies (a Christmas movie featuring talking dogs) and Marriage Story the same day. I have a playlist that includes both bubblegum pop and industrial music. I celebrated my birthday with the Barbenheimer experience. My entertainment choices are like my mood swings: startling and unpredictable.

I didn't intentionally set out to go see Akiva Schaffer's reboot of The Naked Gun within less than 18 hours of Zach Cregger's Weapons, it just worked out that way. It's something I should do more often, because horror and comedy are the ideal pairing, the wine and cheese of cinema. Both tap into that sense of shock and exhilaration, and have at least the potential for visceral discomfort. Both are dismissed as being "less than" their dramatic counterparts, though they're much harder to do successfully.

If anything, while horror is on a long and glorious roll, where even dusty tropes like vampires and haunted objects are being given fresh and exciting new coats of paint, comedy has been struggling. If you need proof of the dire state of comedy, just take a look at this list of movies released since 2020 and check off how many titles you've even heard of, let alone seen. Even five years after the beginning of COVID, audiences don't seem to be terribly interested in comedies unless they overlap with other genres, like last year's Deadpool & Wolverine, or are made for children, like Inside Out 2, though considering the lukewarm-at-best response to this year's Smurfs, that doesn't always help either.

Unsurprisingly, Smurfs aside, the most successful recent comedies have been predominantly sequels or reboots, so reviving The Naked Gun to capitalize on that was inevitable. NuNaked Gun is that secret third thing, the "legacy sequel," which is what they call it when the next movie in a franchise is released many years, even decades, after the last one. In this case, it's been so long that nearly all the actors involved in the original, except for Priscilla Presley, the guy who played Pahpshmear, and Reggie Jackson, are dead. The son of Frank Drebin is played by Liam Neeson, who is 73 years old (though that being said share your skincare routine, Liam, because you look great).

The general reaction to the announcement that The Naked Gun was being revived was a polite "Sure, that's fine." Frankly, it was strange that it took this long to happen. The slightly underwhelming trailer was greeted (by me, at least) with a shrug and "I'll probably wait for that to come to streaming." Yes, it was co-written and directed by Akiva Schaffer, who co-wrote Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, one of the best comedies of the past decade. But he also directed The Watch, which was straight doo doo. Beyond that, the slapstick parody genre had long been marred by the abhorrent [BLANK] Movie franchise, and the pestilential Not Another [BLANK] Movie films. I envisioned a labored mess of gross-out humor, pop culture references that would already be dated by the time it came out (maybe they'd put The Rizzler in it or some shit), and tired jokes about someone going "viral."

Turns out, it's pretty goddamn funny. To be clear, my expectations were so low I almost tripped over them going into the theater, and Schaffer and his co-writers didn't reinvent comedy. Still, its hit-to-miss ratio as far as jokes are concerned is better than any other comedy I've seen in the past five years (save for my beloved Barb & Star Go to Vista del Mar) and blessedly free of any jokes about going viral, or Trump's hair, or skibidi toilets, or anything else anchoring it to this wretched period in history.

I won't recount the plot, because it's a Naked Gun movie, what the fuck kind of plot do you expect? Stepping into Lieutenant Frank Drebin's (probably mismatched) shoes is his large adult son, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Jr. (Liam Neeson), whose partner (Paul Walter Hauser) is the large adult son of Drebin, Sr.'s partner (O.J. Simpson's character, the hapless Nordberg, is referenced exactly once). Frank, Jr. investigates a fatal car crash that's connected to millionaire techbro Richard Cane (Danny Huston, playing Elon Musk if Elon Musk had even a modicum of charisma), and introduces him to scat singing femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, who is delightful), with whom Frank falls madly in love. Wackiness ensues. Frank and Cane bond over their mutual love for The Black-Eyed Peas. A snowman comes to horrifying life. Frank accidentally exposes his (pixelated) dick and balls to a crowd celebrating New Year's Eve while trying to save their lives. It's all much funnier than I'm making it sound.

While Police Squad!, from whence this all came, mostly parodied old cop shows like Dragnet and Police Story, the original Naked Gun movies skewed closer to Dirty Harry and other "shoot first and ask questions never" movie cops. In the era of Michael Brown and George Floyd, is there still a place for comedies about dumb cops asserting their authority to disastrous results? Well, yes, if said cop is a tough guy who also almost shits himself and refers to his late father as "Daddy." Though he's the hero, Frank, Jr. is also an idiot who solves his cases mostly by accident. He obliviously runs people over with his car, and the only reason he can remember a specific person out of the thousands he's shot is because the victim was white. That last gag got a nice combination of laughs and gasps from my audience, in keeping with these very laugh-wincing times.

There's also a funny running gag about how Frank, Jr. and his partner are constantly given cups of coffee wherever they go, even if they're driving, and how the husband of their aggrieved superior (CCH Pounder) is inexplicably always asleep. Granted, neither of these is as funny as the baseball bloopers gag from the original, during which an Angels outfielder runs into a stadium wall and his head falls off. But it's funny enough, it doesn't overstay its welcome at just 85 minutes long, and it's a nice respite from the foibles of insufferable rich people, which is mostly what contemporary comedy seems to consist of.

After sleeping in the lobby of my local Alamo Drafthouse, I returned the next afternoon for a screening of Weapons, expecting a jarring tonal shift. While Zach Cregger's last movie, Barbarian, was funny in a horrifying way, nothing about the trailer or the plot of Weapons (which involved missing children) suggested that it was a laugh riot. And yet, it's very funny, both the wince-inducing kind and the regular kind. Similar to Barbarian, what starts as one movie abruptly turns into a different movie, and yet somehow they manage to come together in the end seamlessly

As with The Naked Gun, I won't recount too much of the plot, not because there isn't one but because it's best if you go in knowing as little as possible, other than the fact that it won't go where you might expect it to. It takes place in a small Pennsylvania town after some of its children have disappeared. This is no ordinary "stranger danger" situation, however: they all disappeared at the same time, 2:17 a.m. to be exact, and seemingly of their own volition, running out of their houses and into the night. I don't know that there will be an eerier image in horror this year than the sequence of the children running in the shadows to the tune of George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness," silent but with something that looks like carefree joy.

Also troubling and inexplicable is the fact that the children were classmates, all taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a troubled but dedicated teacher. Though cleared by the police, she's a primary target of suspicion and hostility by the children's parents, mostly out of a lack of any other potential suspects. While Justine is an alcoholic with a messy personal life, as the police chief (Toby Huss) notes, none of that points to a predilection (let alone a motive) for hurting children.

Where more reasonable-minded people would lie low for a while, Justine is almost defiant in her innocence, going about her business as if nothing's wrong and even trying to investigate the disappearances herself, particularly if and how the one student in her class who didn't disappear, a little boy named Alex (Cary Christopher), is connected to them. This puts her in the path of Archer (Josh Brolin), the grieving, angry father of one of her missing students, Marcus (Benedict Wong), the caring but overwhelmed principal at Justine's school, and Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a hapless beat cop (and Justine's occasional lover) who's struggling with his sobriety. All of them are instrumental in a climax that...well, just go see it for yourself. There's a lot I left out.

Brian Tallerico of Roger Ebert's website described Weapons as a combination of Magnolia and George Romero's The Crazies, and I honestly cannot think of a better way to put it than that. Folks who go into it expecting a Point A to Point B explanation of what happened to the missing children will be disappointed. A good portion of it is dedicated to the characters just stumbling through the aftermath, looking for answers, trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, facing their own ineptitude, drinking to cover up the messiness of it all, and attempting to enjoy a spread of hot dogs and cookies.

Though Cregger has stated that the film isn't specifically an allegory for school shootings, it's impossible not to view it through that lens, especially in how, just a month after the disappearances, the town seems eager to put it behind them. The police certainly are, as they express annoyance at Archer's constant demands for new information. Just because he doesn't have anything better to do than find out what happened to his missing son doesn't mean they don't either, after all. It's hard to watch it and not think of how the President, while on his endless campaign tour last summer, noted the day after a school shooting that it was sad but "we need to move on."

And yet, it's a very funny movie too. Once it's revealed what's behind the disappearance, it becomes absurd, but in a good way, the kind of way that makes you realize just about anything could happen. It is most definitely not a movie for viewers who require an explanation for everything. I have no doubt that if I were to look on YouTube right now, I'd find several videos of men shouting about "plot holes," even though the information Cregger leaves out feels quite deliberate, and not an issue of editing or poor screenwriting.

It doesn't have to make sense (indeed, one could say that school shootings don't make sense either), it's a movie that opens with a bunch of little kids being drawn out of their houses in the middle of the night like an invisible Pied Piper is playing the flute. Like The Naked Gun being just funny enough to be good, so too does Weapons work on that unsettling premise alone. Everything else is just a bonus.