GUN AND GAMES

Opening this weekend:

The Naked Gun--It's in the trailer anyway, so allow me a spoiler: "Please, take a chair," says Detective Frank Drebin to his beautiful costar. After politely declining on the grounds that she has plenty of chairs at home, she ends up walking out with a chair.

There are better jokes in the movie, and there are worse jokes, too. But it's a fair representative.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer, this new version of the late-'80s/early-'90s-era series, derived from the short-lived 1982 TV show Police Squad! (the first feature was titled The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) shows real allegiance to its source. There's some fine silly wordplay and elaborately constructed sight gags. Most essentially, though, the movie keeps a first-rate poker face.

Frank's adversary this time is a rich guy (Danny Huston), boss of a company that sells self-driving cars. He's also the head of a cabal of "evil billionaires" with an ambitious plot to cleanse the earth of mediocrities and rebuild it to their advantage. But the plot is little more than a clothesline on which to hang schtick. 

The old show and the first three movies were the creations of writer-director-producers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and writer Pat Proft, who in various combinations were also behind the Airplane! and Hot Shots! movies. Their seeming approach was to fling multiple dumb gags per minute at the audience, apparently on the theory that if only one of them landed, the movie would still be a laugh a minute.

But their best trick was to let old-school, stone cold serious actors like Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and George Kennedy deliver those dumb gags. And nobody benefitted from this technique more than Leslie Nielsen. Younger audiences may not remember that Nielsen had been a bland leading man who had graduated to authority figures and shady villains as he matured, until Airplane! allowed him to let out his goofy side. Before 1980, the idea that he would have become a major comedy star would have seemed funnier than most of the jokes in those movies.

Liam Neeson is probably about as close a contemporary equivalent to Nielsen as you could find. In the new film, Neeson takes his cue from Nielsen and plays it utterly, hilariously straight as Frank Drebin the Younger. If you happen to reflect that that's Oscar Schindler, or the avenging middle-aged tough guy from the Taken flicks, up there glowering and deadpanning those absurd dad jokes and acting out that slapstick and potty humor, it deepens the comedic effect.

Pamela Anderson is just as game as Neeson's leading lady, at one point knocking out a jaw-dropping scat number. She keeps her dignity through some major raunch, and through one of the strangest romantic montages ever.

It takes very smart people to craft something this artfully stupid, and while this style of comedy might not be the healthiest as a steady diet, The Naked Gun could be just what we need right at the moment. Maybe smartest of all, it's blessedly short, clocking in at under an hour and a half. Brevity is the soul of wit; it's also the soul of this movie.

I AM WHAT I AMAZON

Opening this week:

Wonder Woman—DC's pioneering superheroine finally takes the lead in a feature film with this lavish origin story, set in the World War I era. The title character, Diana by name, has grown from a feisty little girl into the impressive adult form of Gal Gadot on the secret, hidden island of the Amazons, under the watchful eye of her Mom Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). Against Hippolyta's wishes, she's secretly trained as a warrior by her aunt, Antiobe (Robin Wright, sporting an accent to vaguely match Nielsen's and Gadot's).

One day Diana rescues daredevil American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), who happens upon the island while escaping from the Germans. She's appalled when she learns of the ubiquity of war in the outside world, and she's convinced it's the malicious work of Ares the war god. She decides, again over Mom's objections, to let Trevor take her to the Front in Europe, where she plans to identify Ares, kick the crap out of him, and end war on Earth once and for all. She's not ambitious or anything.

With Trevor, she travels first to London and then, with a ragtag group of ethnically mixed sidekicks, to Belgium, and learns that shutting down war isn't as simple as it ought to be. She also runs afoul of various villains, among them a scarred chemist known as Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya, masked much as she was in Almodovar's superb The Skin I Live In).

Setting this movie during WWI, rather than having Wonder Woman battling the Nazis as she was originally created to do (the character debuted in the comics in 1941), initially seemed wrong to me, and there were moments where the dialogue and other details seemed off, period-wise. I'd guess that, among other reasons, the filmmakers wanted Diana to enter civilization at an even less emancipated time for her gender; they wanted her to encounter corsets and petticoats. They may also have wanted less familiar, less easily loath-able bad guys than the Nazis, so as to spread around the blame for warmongering more equitably among all humankind.

In any case, as the movie progressed my resistance to it quickly wore off. Wonder Woman isn't quite as slick as last year's Dr. Strange, but it's more touching, and like Dr. Strange, it's a non-facetious superhero flick that it's possible to wholeheartedly enjoy, almost from beginning to end. The movie is colorful and playful, even sunny at times, but better still there's a lack of cynicism to it, an openhearted, unembarrassed sense of decency and heroism that's highly gratifying after years of self-consciously "dark" comic-book sagas.

This tone is reflected in the warmth and emotional directness of Gadot's performance—she has a quick throwaway scene involving an ice cream cone that made me fall in love with her. The lack of coyness between her and Pine's Trevor is likewise refreshing. They don't tediously bicker or one-up each other.

Diana is so preoccupied with her mission that she barely seems to notice how she scandalizes the male authority figures she meets, ignoring their shock at her outspokenness as if it's too unimportant to acknowledge. And when she expresses disbelief at the matter-of-fact acceptance of war, she doesn't seem infantile, because director Patty Jenkins and the writers (Allan Heinberg among other hands) have structured the story so that we see our own civilization from her point of view.

The filmmakers grapple, while staying within a conventional template for this kind of movie, with the persistent limitation of superhero stories: The tendency to reduce all conflicts to a climactic brawl. That they don't prevail—the movie does indeed climax with a brawl, and one that's of questionable relevance to the vexing problem of the human tendency to make war not love—doesn't make the attempt any less honorable. 

Also opening in the Valley this week...

...is the historical drama Churchill, with the great Brian Cox playing the title role. I had the chance to chat with director Jonathan Teplitzky; you can read my interview on the New Times blog.

And Sunday evening at FilmBar Phoenix...

...is a showing of The Quiet Earth, the 1985 sci-fi classic from New Zealand, with an introduction and Q&A by co-writer and co-producer Sam Pillsbury. You can read my short article on this memorable flick on the Phoenix Magazine blog.