I’m 51 years old. I happened to catch Top Secret on TV a few weeks ago and I laughed my ass off.
I rewatched the original Naked Guns over the past few days. The wordplay was still pretty funny, but the slapstick and direct parodies (e.g. the references to Thelma and Louise in the third one) were hit-and-miss.
That’s the problem with direct parody, it can age badly if it’s of something fairly contemporary that slips from the public consciousness. General sight and word gags can be timeless.
Love the old ones, laughed through the new one. The tone was exactly right and the movie didn’t fall into a trap of trying to rise above being goofy.
The credits have a lot of jokes in them, so they’re worth reading through. Kind of like a scavenger hunt.
I’ve always loved (for some reason) this sequence in the Top Secret end credits:
Focus Loader - Jack Williams
Focus Puller - Tony Strachan
Clapper Loader - John Fletcher
Clapper Puller - Tom Brown
Puller Clapper - Joe Taylor
Clapper Clapper - Edward Davis
Flipper Flapper - Jane Thomas
when i seen the preview i thought they were going to try too hard with the realistic violence ….
Please nominate Liam Neeson’s song “My Sweet Beth” for an Oscar so he can perform it at the big show.
So googling says term no. 2 and 3 is real jobs. I guess the rest is just made up, sorted by most to least plausible?
Saw the matinee yesterday afternoon (because I’m so old that I go to Tuesday matinees now) in a theater with me, Mrs. Homie, and maybe 6-8 other patrons. I’d say it was pretty good, not great. Part of my (somewhat) lukewarm reaction may be that the theater was mostly empty and a full house laughing their asses off would have made the experience better. Still, overall I give it a B+.
I saw it today with my husband and my oldest son. They both loved it. I was eh, but then I wasn’t a big fan of the original style anyway. Did anyone else notice the beaver of “nice beaver,” fame, made a quick cameo appearance?
Saw it yesterday. When it was funny, it was amazing. I laughed a lot.
I also thought there were unfunny gags that went on for too long, like the snowman, the playing of the body cam footage, and the owl bits.
So it was uneven. But well worth seeing.
Saw it again at home with my wife. What are your favorite jokes from the movie? I liked:
-
Ed drinking beers with the children at the end. I would have done a spit-take if I had been drinking something.
-
“She had a bottom that would make any bowl beg for the brown.”
-
Drebin being mad because his DVR had Buffy on it and she connected it to the internet and it all got lost.
We finally saw the new Naked Gun in the theater last night. As others have said, it was good, not great. A few decent chuckles, but it didn’t have the rapid-fire joke delivery and clever wordplay that I seem to remember from the older movies and TV show. I should watch the older Naked Guns and see how they hold up for me.
I think none live up to Airplane! or Top Secret!
Airplane is just the funniest pure joke-based comedy.
Top Secret is one of the best jokes-about-movies comedy. If you re-watch, you’ll see a lot of jokes are actually not about spies, but making movies.
I took my 14 year old son to this new one in the theater, and had been watching all the originals with him recently too.
One thing I noticed is that while the new one didn’t live up to my memory of watching the old one, neither did rewatching the old one. So it felt like a case of “you can be there only exactly once”.
In contrast, my son was cackling with laughter at both old and new, seemingly equally. I agree that they were good and I did enjoy them, but they certainly weren’t the “comedic ecstasy” that 30 years of nostalgia will add. And seeing his reaction definitely added to the experience.