By There are very, very, very, very few films as funny as Naked Gun. Leslie Nielsen’s deadpanning in a Dragnet parody was simply magic. Now, as more and more franchises get revived it seems we could get a reboot of them. Liam Neeson, in pondering his future after action films (again) says that he, Seth MacFarlane, and Paramount have had talks about rebooting the series.
“I’ve been approached by Seth MacFarlane and Paramount Studios to maybe resurrect the Naked Gun films,” Neeson said. “It’ll either finish my career or bring it in another direction. I honestly don’t know.”
The art of the site-gag movie, crammed full of puns and double-takes has become almost non-existent in Hollywood as the style has fallen out of favor. In fairness, it’s really hard to nail and when you don’t it makes for the worst comedy there is. Its downfall was probably the increasingly bad Scary Movie franchise but even before that the films struggled with even the great David Zucker, director of nearly every classic film in the genre, making increasingly bad movies.
However, if there is anyone carrying the torch into the future it’s probably MacFarlane, whose sense of humor in Family Guy is clearly built out of the kind of referential parody and pun-based humor of Naked Gun, Airplane, and Top Secret!. I’d honestly watch a new Naked Gun from him, especially if it pivots to parodying something like Neeson’s revenge thrillers. However, I’m not sure about the Neeson casting. The guy can do humor but that kind of straight-laced delivery that Nielsen excelled at is incredibly hard.
This is, of course, very likely not to happen. Neeson mostly seems to be mentioning this as he ponders the future of his career. While it is a good sign that he says a studio is in on the discussions it doesn’t mean we’d be seeing anything soon.
[via People]