Humanity has been retelling and rebooting stories since the beginning of stories. It’s why Noah is only one of several ‘great flood’ narratives. It’s how you have Roman versions of Greek mythological lore. It’s the reason Br’er Rabbit stories exist alongside African tales of Anansi. In every medium, storytellers have reformatted old stuff to suit a newer audience.
Somehow, when it comes to films and TV, we’re weirdly precious about that fact.
Liam Neeson is not playing the character that Leslie Nielsen played. He’s playing the character’s son. Thus he can be a different personality even though he’s a policeman in the same city. The movies were released in 1988, 1991, and 1994. The television series was shown in 1982. The character should be quite different, just as the time period when the events happen is quite different. If the filmmakers figure out how to make the plot just similar enough and just different enough from the old movies and television series, it could be very good.
If the movie humor is updated to todays culture and attitudes, I think they can make a good comedy. But I am pessimistic about them doing it successfully.
But he probably won’t. Dan Ackroyd’s Joe Friday was the nephew of Jack Webb’s Friday, but still the exact same personality.
I’ve always gotten the names of Liam Neeson and Leslie Nielsen mixed up. This isn’t going to help things.
My guess is this will not be aimed at me, and it’s okay to just let my nostalgia be for a while.
Of course a lot of things get recycled throughout time. That’s not in dispute. The key words are “well-made reboot.” I’ve seen very very few of those.
Also, a well made reboot, or something that combines many pre-existing elements in a new and exciting way, I would include under the heading of “original.” One can be original in the way one combines elements. Again, I’ve seen very little of this.
Please note that this is a sequel and not a reboot. Yes, in general a sequel isn’t as good as the first film in the series. However, there are exceptions. Consider the movie Paddington 2 (2017, U.K., dir. Paul King). It’s a sequel and it got a better rating on Rotten Tomatoes than the first film in the series. Indeed, 99% of its ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.were favorable. Consider the movie Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, Australia/U.S., dir. George Miller), the fourth film in the Mad Max series. 97% of its ratings on Rotten Tomatoes were favorable, better than the first film in the series.
Before you reply to this by saying, “Well, you and those Rotten Tomatoes reviewers were wrong, because I didn’t like those two films”, please note that I’m not saying everybody in the world likes those two films. Certainly there are people who didn’t like them. I’m just saying that the majority of people who saw them liked them better than the first film in each of those series.
And, of course, none of us here have seen the new Naked Gun movie, so we can’t actually state for sure how good it is.
The trailer looks funny.
Aside from that, the only thing I have to add is this. In Hebrew, for some unfathomable reason, the movie’s title was translated as “The Pistol Died of Laughter”.
Well, I did mostly agree with you about reboots; I was just pointing out that very little is truly original anymore, so just because it is a reboot, or a sequel, or seboot, or requel, or whatever this is, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be bad.
I don’t get all the stuff that gets rebooted in name as well as content, and I agree it’s very seldom a home run when it happens. I asked at the time here in a thread about the ‘Lost in Space’ series that came out on Netflix a few years ago-- the characters were very different; the robot was alien tech, not good old-fashioned Earth tech; the situation was different- the Robinsons were still mostly in contact with an affiliation of other space-faring groups from Earth. Why even call it ‘Lost in Space’ rather than another show about a family that has adventures in space? The original campy ‘Lost in Space’ brand was over 50 years old at the time. The '98 movie reboot was a dud and largely forgotten. But Hollywood keeps on doing it…“what old TV show or movie franchise that even Boomers can barely remember should we revive from the dead next? ‘My Mother the Car’? ‘The Flying Nun’? ‘Francis the Talking Mule?’”
I think the fundamental difference is that most of these reboots are cynical corporate reboots. They’re devoid of ideas, they want the safety of a known property because they’re money makers, and they give us some paint-by-numbers movie that’s good enough that idiot consumers will see it because they’re familiar with the franchise.
Whereas this, given the people involved, feels more like a love letter to something they truly appreciated and which they see gone from the market now.
I can’t guarantee that means it will be good, but I don’t think it feels the same as doing a new spiderman trilogy reboot every 3 years.
This isn’t a reboot of a beloved story or even a character, really. It’s a reboot of the Airplane! formula for humor that had longer legs than anybody could have predicted. But it did run out, eventually. This is like someone trying to make a Stooges-like slapstick film today.
They tried it 13 years ago…
MASH The Series: The movie
Happy Days (but darker and edgier! Less happy!)
CPO Sharkey the Motion Picture
Mary Hartman^2
Here’s an article in which the person who wrote it is convinced that that formula for humor will still work. Will it in fact work? I don’t know. Neither do you. None of us here have seen the movie. We’ll just have to wait and find out:
On a very special episode of Happy Days this week, watch Fonzie as he is admitted to the hospital for treatment after his friends stage an intervention for his meth addiction.
I’m a bit skeptical whether a “formula for humor” can actually “run out” and be incapable of ever working/being funny again.
If so, why? Is it because all the jokes. gags, etc. that can possibly be derived from that formula have already been done?
Is it because the style is so outdated that no one finds it funny any more?
Is it because the people who make that kind of humor are no longer around, and nobody new has or ever will have the knack?
You’re joking, but didn’t they talk about doing a dark and edgy reboot of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Whatever happened with that?
If someone can, more power to them. But it is a risky move. Nobody is lining up to see someone get hit in the face with a pie.
How about a reboot of “Heil, Honey, I’m Home” except set it in the White House and have the Musks be the wacky next door neighbors?
It’s gold, Jerry!
Well, maybe if the pie is ironic.