David Zucker, who helmed the first two Naked Gun films, wasn’t the biggest fan of the reboot, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson.
During a recent interview with Woman’s World, the filmmaker claimed the new film, The Naked Gun, tried to replicate the spoof comedy style developed by Zucker, his brother Jerry and their partner Jim Abrahams, but “totally missed.”
“My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style — and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently,” Zucker explained. “People started copying it, like Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.”
The Naked Gun was directed by Akiva Schaffer, but MacFarlane served as a producer. The reboot follows Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Lt. Frank Drebin (played by the late Leslie Nielsen in the original trilogy), who follows in his father’s footsteps and works as a detective to solve a murder case and save his police department from closure.
“They tried to replace Leslie Nielsen in the new Naked Gun, and you can’t replace him. No one else can do that,” Zucker added.
The Scary Movie 3 director also criticized the production budget for the new Naked Gun installment, which cost approximately $42 million to make. While the original 1988 film reportedly had a budget of $15 million, that would equate to roughly $41 million today, once adjusted for inflation.
“You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz,” Zucker said. “Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new Naked Gun, you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style.”
He added, “Everybody’s in it for the money now, and that feels like the only reason why they wanted to do a new Naked Gun.”
Zucker directed 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! and 1991’s The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, while Peter Segal helmed 1994’s Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.
The filmmaker previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he had no plans to watch the reboot but saw the film’s positive reception as a sign “there’s a strong market for comedy in movie theaters, and spoof in particular.”
He also noted that he wished Schaffer well, but declined an invitation from the director to see an early cut of it. “I told him there’s nothing I could do to help because it really isn’t what I would have done,” Zucker admitted. That’s not to say that he didn’t actually end up doing a good movie. But I don’t think I could help with that.” He had previously been outspoken about feeling burned that he and other team members of the original film were not asked to be involved with the reboot.
