Ask Spling – Episode 3: How does The Naked Gun reboot compare with the original?

In Episode 3 of ‘Ask Spling: Reel Talk and Real Life’… Spling answers: “How does The Naked Gun reboot compare with the original?”

Welcome to Ask Spling. This question is quite personal for me because I’m such a fan of the original The Naked Gun trilogy. The third one wasn’t obviously that great, the second one was diminishing returns.

The first one is such a classic, it’s like one of my favourite films of all time and I just loved Leslie Nielsen, the way that he’s able to play it so straight-faced and that rubber face of his and the car that’s like another character and the background scenes where there’s always something funny going on and the delivery of the lines is just impeccable for me.

So obviously it was going to be quite a difficult thing to beat and while I think Liam Neeson is a surprisingly good choice, he’s able to play it straight when you see him opposite Ricky Gervais in that one clip, he can be in on the joke and I think it was quite a good call and especially bringing with him his whole history as an action star and doing something different, breaking type. So I think he did a great job.

It was interesting to see Pamela Anderson there as well but this film started off well and it had some great jokes and ideas and was really doing its best to try and slot in with the whole Naked Gun appeal and slapstick thing and it’s really welcome in terms of the timing of it as well… we just need some escapism in that way… but it really just diminished and diminished as we went along, the laughs and the jokes and it just got over the top and I just felt like it wasn’t quite as crisp as it should have been.

So it was a nice distraction but unfortunately for me it’s like, just pales in comparison to the original.

About Ask Spling

This weekly shorts series features film critic, Stephen “Spling” Aspeling answering questions to do with film, or anything for that matter!