Paramount PicturesIf you’ve felt like Hollywood theatrical comedies have been going the way of the dinosaur, you may not be alone. In which case, the reboot of The Naked Gun (from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’s Akiva Schaffer) will feel like an answer to your most desperate prayers in the form of several dozen pie gags to the face — metaphorically speaking. The actual gags in Schaffer’s Liam Neeson vehicle are, simultaneously, a whole lot dumber and a whole lot smarter than that, and they’re fired off with such machine-gun pacing that you might miss a couple while laughing, or simply blinking. It’s the funniest goddamn thing in years.The series dates back to the 1982 cop parody show Police Squad! by Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker. This was followed by three Naked Gun theatrical films — the first one, 2 ½, and 33 ⅓ — from the late ‘80s through 1994. Three decades later, grizzled action mainstay Liam Neeson plays the son of the originals’ po-faced Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), named Frank Drebin Jr., but pretty much every newcomer is the son of some existing character, and they have the same names as their fathers. It’s the most obvious and tongue-in-cheek way to create both a reboot and a legacy sequel, but this premise pays dividends without overstaying its welcome. After all but explaining this relationship to the originals, The Naked Gun charges forward without lingering on this meta-textual dynamic. Instead, it tells a story about the pitfalls of sentimental reverence, while also functioning as a goofy throwback to the kind of absurd Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker genre parodies seldom seen today. It also features as many jokes-per-minute as the trio’s Airplane! and Top Secret! (it really should’ve been called “The Naked Gun!”).An opening bank robbery in the vein of The Dark Knight (down to Loren Balfe riffing on Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s nerve-wracking score) sets the stage for Neeson’s physics-breaking Drebin, who shows up in the guise of a girl scout and thwarts the armed thieves by breaking and even munching on their guns. One of the goons, played by Kevin Durand, gets away with a hard drive called the P.L.O.T. Device, which in turn gives way to a high-tech murder mystery shot with the verve (and the incessant lens flare) of a modern, mile-a-minute thriller with a digital sheen. And yet, Schaffer’s take on the material retains the originals’ neo-noir qualities — from the harsh eye-lighting to the hardboiled detective voiceover — only it pushes each of these genre elements to their absolute extreme. Just as Neeson’s Drebin hopes to be just like his father, yet something entirely new, so too does the film make good on this promise through its aesthetic approach. It’s a sure-footed, highly competent piece of filmmaking, which serves as the perfectly stoic foundation for its slapstick gags, and sudden asides that feel like Lonely Island sketches.Neeson finds a terrific scene partner in Pamela Anderson. | Paramount PicturesCoffee cups are handed off screen to Drebin and his partner Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser in the George Kennedy Role) with increasing regularity and absurdity in every scene, as Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand test the limits of repetition and escalation. What’s more, the frame is filled with stealth jokes at every turn, extending far into the background, even out of focus. There’s barely a shot or line of dialogue that isn’t a joke, and the film has a stunning (and eye-watering) success rate. In keeping with the original films, it almost never winks, affording a confusingly-accented, psychotically violent Neeson and a femme fatale Pamela Anderson — the B-side to her dramatic comeback in last year’s The Last Showgirl — the chance to look absolute foolish with a straight face, and without apology. Anderson plays a vulnerable true crime author with a connection to Drebin’s latest case, and quickly becomes the object of his desire in a surprisingly sincere romance that takes on a bizarre life of its own, outside the confines of the central plot. You won’t guess the nature of this detour in a million years, but that it takes place on a ski resort — the kind where Neeson lost his real-life wife Natasha Richardson — and that Drebin makes joking references to his “dead cop wife,” imbues the film with a surprising gravity too.Neeson’s unruly Drebin doesn’t seek to be anything like Nielson’s more centered and straightforward incarnation. It’s a much more unruly take on the parody detective, and fittingly Dirty Harry-esque for an era where police violence and accountability are a more prevalent part of everyday conversations (the film doesn’t pull its punches, it just labels them more distinctly). In the process, Neeson’s baggage at the weathered lead of Taken and its many clones, always playing embittered men steeped in loss or trying to recover kidnapped family members, makes him the perfect, brooding capsule for this particular story. Invoking thoughts of a real-life passing in a raunchy studio comedy may seem counter-intuitive, but nothing is sacrosanct in The Naked Gun, least of all the vengeful and violently heroic image Neeson has created for himself on screen.Mission: Impossible is just one of the many action franchises that get parodied in the new Naked Gun. | Paramount PicturesWhile the film-at-large pokes a hole in this façade (with Neeson gleefully along for the ride), the plot similarly lets the air out of the kind of masculine navel-gazing that has become a poison of late. The movie’s villain, electric car mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston), is a distinctly Elon Musk type, not just for his business endeavors, but for his white supremacist obsessions with fertility rates, and his retrograde desires to “RETVRN” to some lost, animalistic form of manliness, which he believes the world has denied him. Granted, the film’s approach to these heavy political themes is as serious as a whoopie cushion, but that they’re present at all — alongside potshots at cryptocurrency and other Ponzi schemes associated with the “manosphere” — is a clear-as-day statement about how little The Naked Gun is concerned with cultural nostalgia (even for the beloved Mission: Impossible series, which isn’t spared a skewering).The film has a handful of jokes that directly call back to ones from the originals. But for the most part, its throwbacks are entirely stylistic, harkening back to an era of unhinged, “anything goes” comedic construction, where the bounds of the frame, and the rules of reality, are no hurdles to a foolish gag. It has the smarts to use its cast members’ strengths to their fullest, and the shamelessness to hurl every idiotic idea at the wall at full force, resulting in an absolute riot.The Naked Gun opens in theaters August 1.