Latest news with #LeslieNielsen
National Post
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- National Post
Naked Gun co-stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are reportedly dating
In a move that couldn't come soon enough for movie marketers, Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, stars of this Friday's new movie The Naked Gun, are said to be dating. Article content A source close to the movie told People magazine: 'It's a budding romance in the early stages. It's sincere, and it's clear they're smitten with each other.' Article content Article content Neeson, 73, stars in the movie as Frank Drebin Jr., son of Leslie Nielsen's character from the original Naked Gun series. That began with the short-lived TV series Police Squad! (it ran for just six episodes in 1982), which then was spun off into three films. They were The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994). Article content Nielsen got his start as a serious actor before making his way into such comedies as Airplane! and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Neeson, similarly, has seen his career careen over time. He began with serious roles — he starred in Schindler's List while Nielsen was making Naked Gun sequels — and then transitioned into being an action hero (Taken came out in 2008) before this new move into comedy. Article content Anderson, 58, plays Drebin's love interest, Beth, in the new movie; roughly the same role played by Priscilla Presley in the first Naked Gun film. Famous for TV's Baywatch in the 1990s, Anderson has moved between dramatic and comedic roles since then, with the latter including Scary Movie 3, Superhero Movie (also with fellow Canadian Nielsen) and 2006's Borat, where she performed so well in a cameo as herself that many people at the time believed she'd been unaware she was in a movie. Article content Neeson and Anderson each brought their sons with them to a red-carpet premiere of The Naked Gun in New York on Monday. Anderson has two sons — Brandon, 29, and Dylan, 27, with ex-husband Tommy Lee — while Neeson has two sons, Micheál, 30, and Daniel, 28, with late wife Natasha Richardson, who died in 2009 after a skiing accident in Quebec. Article content People reported that, the next day, the two stars pretended to be caught making out on live TV, a possible reference to the recent 'kisscam' debacle at a Coldplay concert. An earlier interview from October had Neeson saying he was 'madly in love' with his co-star, whom he called 'funny and so easy to work with.' She reciprocated, calling Neeson 'the perfect gentleman' and adding: 'It was an absolute honour to work with him.' Article content Article content
Toronto Star
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Movie Review: Liam Neeson tries to fill Leslie Nielsen's gumshoes in a new ‘Naked Gun'
Some say directing is 90% casting. In the case of Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin, it was more like 110%. The choice of Nielsen for 'Police Squad!' and the subsequent 'Naked Gun' movies deserves a special place in the annals of brilliant casting choices. Surely you could say that the masters of spoof — David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — first struck gold in putting Nielsen in 'Airplane!' But why, exactly, Nielsen was so perfect for 1988's 'The Naked Gun' is natural to ponder during Akiva Schaffer's spirited but just off-the-mark reboot, starring Liam Neeson.
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Liam Neeson's Naked Gun is one of the stupidest films I've ever seen. I loved it
Since I can tell you in 20 words that the new Naked Gun film with Liam Neeson is so funny it made me physically crumple in my seat on multiple occasions, it's unclear what the rest of this review needs to actually do. But suffice it to say, if you appreciate the particular style of humour in which the spoof police comedy series specialised in the 1980s and 1990s – deadpan imbecility, surreal micro-interludes, innocent domestic activities resembling sex acts when viewed from a distance in silhouette, and so on – then chances are you, too, will find yourself cackling away on a slow yet steady slide towards the carpet. Like Top Gun: Maverick or Star Wars: Episode VII, the new Naked Gun is another legacy sequel which exists purely to revive a winning formula the industry hasn't tried for a bit. It's not an especially daring production – while the script's long list of targets might encompass everything from bestiality to racist policing, it's content to tweak taboos rather than bust them – three things about it stun nonetheless. One is how well-suited Neeson is to the part of poker-faced detective Frank Drebin Jr, the son of the character Leslie Nielsen played in the previous films. Like Nielsen, he delivers his dialogue with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds its lunacy. If the Taken star's past decade of throwaway action roles achieved nothing else, they at least equipped him with exactly the sort of no-nonsense screen persona required to sell some of the most unapologetically all-nonsense material to be seen since the early 1990s. The plot, insofar as it matters (and it doesn't), loosely reworks the 1988 original for a modern audience. In a Los Angeles still pleasingly attuned to its noirish roots, Danny Huston's vaguely Musk-y electric car mogul is perfecting a mind-control gizmo known as the P.L.O.T. Device. An admirably age-appropriate femme fatale – winningly played by a game-for-anything Pamela Anderson – comes to Drebin with the intel that can eventually disarm it. The second, more fundamental shock is the mere fact of the film's existence, almost a decade after Hollywood decided that mainstream comedies – sequels, reboots or otherwise – had become more trouble than they were probably worth. (Too little scope for franchise integration; too much for unforced PR nightmares, as social media scrutinises every pratfall for wrongthink.) Presumably the Naked Gun brand still carried just enough weight to get this one made, though there are relatively few overt heritage callbacks, aside from a handful of sketch premises and the inevitable cameo by a certain taxidermied broad-tailed rodent. The third surprise – perhaps the most surprising of all – is how uncannily director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers recapture the sheer comedic relentlessness of the original Naked Gun trilogy at their best, while maintaining an impressively high level of gag-by-gag quality control. (It's a pity that David Zucker, one third of the legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team behind the original films, has vowed not to watch this one, as he'd find nothing but the sincerest form of flattery here.) With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you'd still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that. Some of the best jokes get temporarily lost inside themselves, such as the romantic alpine getaway interlude that plays like an extended standalone Neeson-Anderson skit, and in which the couple's easy on-screen chemistry – even amid some dazzlingly mad turns of events – will do little to quell the current talk of real-life romance. But many more inspired comic concepts are burned through in a flash, and are all the funnier for it. See it with an audience, and experience the rare and wonderful pleasure of a crowd scrambling to keep up with one of the stupidest films it's ever seen.
Irish Times
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Naked Gun review: Liam Neeson a bit of a puzzle amid big dumb fun
The Naked Gun Director : Akiva Schaffer Cert : 15A Starring : Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston Running Time : 1 hr 25 mins When, way back in 1982, Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers launched Police Squad! – TV forerunner of the Naked Gun films – the cop shows being parodied were already drifting out of fashion. Those pompous episode titles and woody performances were riffing on Quinn Martin series from the previous decade (and farther back than that). A malcontent in the 21st century might reasonably wonder what possible sense a 'legacy sequel' could still have. 'They don't make cop movies any more,' a Zucker brother said not so long ago. 'When you do parody, you've got to spoof something current.' You may as well launch a comedy aping the conventions of medieval mystery plays. Right? Akiva Schaffer, director and co-writer of the first Naked Gun film for more than 30 years, has taken some of those arguments on board. You will detect a few riffs on Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible adventures. There are (obviously) a few more on Liam Neeson 's recent run of revenge thrillers. Contemporary pop culture works its way in. But the new film essentially works within the old structures. Neeson, as Frank Drebin jnr, son of Leslie Nielsen 's original dumb copper, still works at an old-school Los Angeles precinct with grumpy men in lounge suits. The films seems to think 'content creators' still deliver mystery dramas in which officers stand off against evil geniuses in southern-California mansions. READ MORE None of that matters. It never did. The same team's Airplane! still plays well with audiences whose parents were barely sentient during the 1970s disaster-movie boom. The Naked Gun was a joke-delivery system whose allusions to Cannon and The Streets of San Francisco were mere decoration. The current Naked Gun has its flaws, but none of them stems from anachronism. It is at its best when playing with the original series' deadpan linguistic misunderstandings. 'You can't fight City Hall,' the set-up comes. 'No ... it's a building,' comes the reply. As before, the character delivering the feed doesn't point out that wasn't quite what he meant. The conversation carries on as if that was what he meant. The Naked Gun: Eddie Yu as Detective Park, Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr and Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. Photograph: Frank Masi/Paramount Pictures The supporting cast are all on board with this conceit. Pamela Anderson , still enjoying her deserved renaissance, accommodates the straightest of faces to a noirish simmer. Danny Huston is equally strong as an evil billionaire who doesn't believe anyone so dumb as Drebin can thwart his plans. CCH Pounder does good angry boss. Paul Walter Hauser is an ideal sidekick. [ Liam Neeson: From Paisley-loving Catholic boy to actor, then action man, now comedy star Opens in new window ] Neeson himself is more of a quandary. He's never bad. He doesn't kill the joke. But it does feel as if too much acting's going on. Somewhere in here there's a line about being 'the same as you but completely different and original'. It is, unfortunately, impossible to watch a second of Neeson without considering Nielsen's heroic blankness. Our man looks to be making the unfortunate, though not fatal, mistake of trying to make sense of every line. Drebin jnr is thinking things through. His dad allowed no such complicating process. [ Pamela Anderson: 'I felt like life was really like death for me' Opens in new window ] That reservation aside, it must be admitted that, against the odds, the team do a largely satisfactory job of reanimating the corpse. I'm not sure audiences will have quite as much fun watching the thing as the writers plainly had getting it on to the page. But they have certainly stuck to the brief with admirable diligence. The inevitable backward-looking cameos are kept to a bare minimum. Nobody expects you to follow the preposterous plot. Some of the funniest jokes are held for an extended end-credit sequence that expands brilliantly on a solid recurring gag from the original series. We deserve some big dumb fun. We always do. [ Magic movies: The 25 best comedies of the past 25 years – in reverse order Opens in new window ] In cinemas from Friday, August 1st
San Francisco Chronicle
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘The Naked Gun' review: Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson play it for laughs — and nail it
Part of the ongoing success of Liam Neeson's action movies, such as ' Taken,' ' Non-Stop ' and ' The Commuter,' has been that they're funny. They deliver in terms of action, but they've also been wonderfully absurd in the way that Neeson will tear into the coarsest melodrama as though it were a Eugene O'Neill tragedy. But can Neeson be funny while actually knowing that he's being funny? Can he deliver in an intentional comedy? Has he been in on the joke all along? Those were questions going into 'The Naked Gun,' and the answer to all of them is yes. 'The Naked Gun' is an extension of a comic franchise that began in 1988 with 'The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!' and seemingly ended in 1994 with 'The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.' Those films starred Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin, an inept police lieutenant. The kick at the time was in seeing Nielsen in a comic context, after he'd been previously known as a dour, dead-serious TV actor. It's risky to take a winning comic formula and transplant another actor into it. For example, though no one would accuse Steve Martin of not being funny, he was the farthest thing from amusing when he attempted to replace Peter Sellers in a reboot of the 'Pink Panther' franchise. Careful to avoid the same mistake, Berkeley-raised director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (' Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping ') re-tools 'The Naked Gun' for Neeson's particular set of skills. The pre-credits sequence shows Drebin, Jr. (Neeson) breaking up a bank robbery, not in a way that's reminiscent of Leslie Nielsen, but of Neeson's action films. Essentially, the whole opening is like something you might see in a 'Taken' movie, but amped up just enough that it becomes ridiculous. Neeson bites a gun in half with his teeth, kills somebody with a lollypop. Later he pulls off a guy's arms and beats him with them. It's a typical Neeson bloodbath, only played for comedy. Schaffer's ability to capitalize on his audience's familiarity with Neeson's action movies is an important element in his comic arsenal, but Schaffer has other comic strategies available to him, as well. There are moments of inspired silliness, as when Drebin talks to a suspect that he mistakenly thinks was convicted of 'man's laughter' rather than 'manslaughter': 'That must have been quite the joke.' There are hints of parody, such as a brief conversation that simultaneously sends up flirtatious moments in 'Double Indemnity' (1944) and 'The Big Sleep' (1946). There are moments of absurdity, as when the smooth-talking villain (Danny Huston) offers a woman a drink and then brags that it's from 'Bill Cosby's private estate.' There are even subtle touches that don't call attention to themselves, such as when Frank puts on a glove and then contaminates a crime scene by touching everything with his other hand. Akiva Schaffer is one third of the Lonely Island comedy trio, and this movie has a lot in common with the troupe's 'Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,' with its imaginative, extended sequences. A comic highlight comes in a scene in which Frank and a mystery woman (Pamela Anderson) are having a perfectly innocent meeting in his apartment. Meanwhile, someone surveilling through an ultraviolet lens gets the false impression that they're performing a series of lewd sex acts, including one involving a dog. The movie starts to slow down in its last third because there's nothing about the actual story to make us keep watching — it's only about the laughs. Fortunately, Schaffer is wise enough not to overstay his welcome. At 85 minutes, 'The Naked Gun' is just the right length. Neeson is a delight and seems to be having as much fun as the audience. But the surprise here is Anderson, who was sad and plaintive in ' The Last Showgirl ' and now reveals herself a skilled and self-aware comedienne. Anderson is having a moment right now, and I'd like to see it continue.
