Of Course: Hollywood Remaking Leslie Nielson Classic "The Naked Gun" with... Ed Helms

Or at least they're "eyeing" Ed Helms.

I like Ed Helms, but this is just Healthcare.gov: The Movie.

First of all, this movie is going to be awful. Obviously. I won't elaborate.

Second of all, Leslie Nielson wasn't a comic actor. He was a character actor known for playing straight-faced authority figures in melodramas. They cast Leslie Nielson in Airplane because they wanted him to deliver lines in his usual melodramatic serious way, but saying ridiculous things.

And then the cast cheeseball "dramatic" actors like George Kennedy and Ricardo Montalban around him. Then they cast people who couldn't act, like O.J. Simpson and Priscilla Presley. Because a movie like this, if it were played straight, would have that sort of a cast.

Casting Ed Helms -- a comic actor -- in the role is just wrong. Helms plays comedy like a comedy actor. They should be going for a melodramatic serious actor like Bruce Greenwood, or a comic actor that plays comedy deadpan, like Gary Cole.*

But this is part of the Stupid of Hollywood. People don't know offhand, who those actors are (though they know them and like them). People have heard of Ed Helms, and they remember he was in a big comedy trilogy, The Hangover.

So even though Ed Helms isn't a box office draw, we'll cast him in this movie, because then people will know it's supposed to be funny. If we cast Gary Cole, people won't know it's supposed to be funny.

I like Ed Helms -- but he's not Frank Drebin.

Hey why not just cast Jim Carrey? He's wild and crazy and people know he's supposed to be funny. Oh wait, it's because no one likes Jim Carrey anymore. Forget I mentioned it.

Third of all, this movie is going to be awful, seriously. Obviously. Although The Naked Gun itself was very funny, the sequel was very disappointing, and the third one flat-out stunk.

This Airplane-style humor is hard to do. It does get repetitive. It's hard to sustain for 90 minutes. Even the Airplane guys themselves have struggled to make funny movies using this sort of joke -- for every decent Airplane-style movie they made, they turned out two or three clunkers.

And so now a bunch of people who aren't terribly funny -- like the sort of people who write the Scary Movie movies -- are going to ripoff a lot of old Airplane and Naked Gun jokes and add their own Naked Gun style jokes. And they'll all be awful.**

But they're now determined to remake every single movie that earned at least $50 million in the past 30 years, so of course, they had to dig up the corpse of The Naked Gun and violate it.

* Actually, Ben Affleck would make a much better Frank Drebin than he would a Bruce Wayne.

** Actually, the article names the writers:

The studio has hired the team behind Night At The Museum and Reno 911, Thomas Lennon and R Ben Garant, to pen a screenplay for the new movie.

Yeah okay, they're not bad, but they don't do Airplane jokes.

posted by Ace at 02:32 PM

| Access Comments