The Naked Gun series must be the only successful big-screen franchise to have been a spin-off from a spectacularly unsuccessful TV series. Although Police Squad went on to become a cult favourite, at the time the American TV network was so unimpressed they only showed four of the six episodes before cancelling it. But Leslie Nielsen's bumbling Lt Frank Drebin just wouldn't go away. Supported in masterly deadpan style by George Kennedy and Priscilla Presley, Nielsen cemented his reputation as a gifted comic actor with The Naked Gun decades after he had first become... known as a minor Hollywood leading man (in 1955's Forbidden Planet for example). The first movie appeared in 1988 and spawned two sequels that replayed exactly the same routines: in The Naked Gun series sight gags (some of which are worthy of the Marx Brothers, some not) combine with excruciating puns and lots of toilet humour to follow the same hit formula as the creators' earlier slapstick masterpiece, Airplane. By the third film the formula may have become more than a little overworked, and few including the filmmakers cared much about the increasingly creaky scenarios, but Nielsen's easygoing idiotic charm goes a long way towards saving the day. There are still a lot of laughs to be found in all three Naked Gun movies, even if some of them are the unintentional result of seeing OJ Simpson before notoriety overtook his budding film career. On the DVDs: All three features are anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 widescreen ratios, with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Each disc also has a jovial ensemble commentary featuring co-creator David Zucker with other producers and writers, which is only intermittently informative but is at least intermittently funny, too. --Mark Walker [show more]
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