This isn’t the kind of film I’d catch in the cinemas at all but I had expiring movie club points so here we are. Liam Neeson seems like unlikely successor to Leslie Nielsen and I have to say that while I appreciate the effort and his straight-faced Frank Drebin, he doesn’t have the comedic timing to pull it off. To me this was good for some giggles and I’m flabbergasted by some of the very weird segues. But I wouldn’t say this was very good. Its gags are neither very original nor very clever and the time is long past when police in America were seen as allies to the people.

Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. of the Police Squad foils a bank robbery by implausibly disguising himself as a schoolgirl but fails to notice that the real objective is to steal a gadget from a safe deposit box. He is next ordered to examine a fatal car crash and concludes that the victim Simon Davenport committed suicide. Simon’s sister Beth shows up at the police station to insist that he didn’t kill himself and being a crime novelist, wants to investigate herself. Simon worked as an engineer for billionaire tech mogul Richard Cane. Drebin realizes that Davenport also owns a local nightclub and that Simon was last seen there. Beth shows up there as well suspecting Crane and she distracts him while Drebin infiltrates the security office, fighting many goons in the process. Behind the scenes, Davenport reveals his scheme to his fellow billionaires. He is planning to use the device to send a signal that will propagate through phones and revert everyone into a primal, barbaric state. The billionaires will shelter the collapse of society in a bunker and reemerge later to rebuild the world as they wish.

I’ve seen snippets of Leslie Nielsen’s work all over the place but I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever watched the final film of his Naked Gun trilogy in its entirety. I did like most of what I did get to see and its easy to notice that Nielsen was a comedic genius with a great sense of timing. He’s not just a straight man in the face of the most ridiculous happenings, he also pulls off a funny “what the fuck is going on” look. Neeson, perhaps to his credit, doesn’t attempt to copy him at all. His version of Drebin is purely the straight man with a heavy dose of absurdly effective action hero, probably a callback to his work on the Taken series. As a result, this doesn’t have the same vibes at all. The old Drebin was funny. This new one is actually kind of terrifying if you think about it. Naturally this is also due to how much society’s perception of the police has changed since then. The police not needing to hold themselves accountable is scary and not amusing at all. A better comedy would have us laugh at the police, not with them.

I do like some of the recurring gags like the police being handed ever bigger cups of coffee all the time and I suppose the wordplay jokes are okay. But most of the humor is recycled. I mean innocuous acts being mistaken as sexual due to being seen in shadow in 2025? Inserting a whole mini-movie into their movie takes some serious chutzpah but was that a reference to Frozen from more than 10 years ago? Drebin’s tirade about his TiVo recordings of old Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes was mystifying to me. It’s ludicrous sure, but beyond that is it simply a reference to how old he is? Not being able to parody any recent and noteworthy police-related shows, they seem to have drawn more widely from popular culture including superhero and spy movies. It’s just not the same as there seems to no particular reason why this has to happen within the context of a Police Squad movie.

All in all, I’d say this is only passably amusing and I wouldn’t consider it a worthy reboot of the franchise. Neeson is neither a good successor to Nielsen nor is the world in dire need of police-related humor. Neeson has been going around promoting this film by saying that it’s needed to save comedy films. While it’s true that the heyday of mass market big Hollywood comedies is over, it’s probably because the audiences have fractured too much and it’s too difficult to write something that would appeal to everyone. There’s still plenty of comedy to be found in smaller films and shows.