Liam Neeson may have gained pop-culture immortality for his gravelly growl of a certain line of dialogue in the 2008 hostage thriller Taken – “I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills” – but the release of his new film, a reboot of the classic spoof cop movie The Naked Gun represents another remarkable turn in Neeson’s distinguished career, which has taken in heavyweight prestige dramas, historical biopics, blockbusting science fiction, superhero epics and head-cracking action cinema.
In The Naked Gun, Neeson has for the first time taken the lead role in an out-and-out comedy. He plays Frank Drebin Jr, the police-detective son of Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin in the original. Created by the celebrated comedy team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, The Naked Gun was released in 1988, with Nielsen featuring in two sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear from 1991 and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994, as well as the preceding TV series Police Squad!, which aired in 1982. Neeson’s intense, unflappable acting style has been acclaimed by critics as a perfect match for Nielsen’s celebrated stone-face delivery; the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw said that Neeson “deadpans it impeccably”, while the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin writes that Neeson “delivers his dialogue with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds its lunacy”.
