Latest news with #JerryZucker
Yahoo
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Funniest Movie Of The Decade Is Here And It Does The Impossible
In the 1970s and 1980s, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker pioneered a completely unique comedy style and expressed it in a series of films so funny that the mere mention of any one of them still makes people smile. Let's try it right now. Airplane! I saw your lips curl. Until this week, when I saw the new version of The Naked Gun, I'd have said that style was impossible to duplicate. But this movie, made with no help from the Zuckers (who offered but were rejected), does it. With apologies to 33 ⅓, the 2025 Naked Gun is the best Naked Gun movie since Naked Gun 2. It might even top the second if Leslie Nielsen were still alive and in the movie's lead role. Instead, we get Liam Neeson as Frank Drebbin Jr. It's an inspired choice. Nielsen started his career as a dramatic performer, and the genius of his comedy work was his way of playing everything deadly serious and straight. You don't need a comedian to duplicate that; you need a serious actor, a serious actor willing to be put in ridiculous situations. Liam fills the role well. No one could top Leslie, but he's a good second-best. He has real chemistry with co-star Pam Anderson, joyously back on screen after a mini-retirement. I won't waste your time with the plot, because who cares. That's not the point of these movies. In the view of The Naked Gun, plot is for untalented writers who can't make jokes. What matters is whether or not The Naked Gun is funny, and hell yes, it is. The genius of past Police Squad entries was how hard they worked to be funny. Like the Police Squad TV series and the Leslie Nielsen movies, every single second of this new Naked Gun is stuffed with jokes. There's not a piece of dialogue or a frame in the film that isn't at least trying to be funny. Most of the time, it succeeds. There are so many jokes of so many types that a laugh is guaranteed unless you're in the 5% of humans who don't have a sense of humor (yes, that's a real statistic). You're likely to laugh at almost all of it. It's that good. Here's my favorite bit: Frank is reading a criminal's rap sheet and says, 'It says here you're doing 25 years for Man's Laughter.' Insert dramatic Liam Neeson pause here. 'It must have been one hell of a joke.' The Naked Gun is one hell of a joke. It's the funniest movie of the decade. Go have a laugh. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Naked Gun' Review: Liam Neeson Nails the Deadpan Goofiness, but Pamela Anderson Is the Scene-Stealer in Uneven Legacy Sequel
The three-man comedy factory that ruled the 1980s with their fusillades of slapstick, sight gags, loopy non sequiturs and winking innuendo was David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — Hollywood's ZAZ before David Zaslav. Their legacy rivals that of Mel Brooks in the '60s and '70s, most notably via Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies, though I also have a soft spot for their swerve into more conventional farce with the acerbic dark comedy Ruthless People. Even the misstep of Top Secret! yielded its share of laughs, despite attempting to hit an unwieldy jumble of parody targets. Having honed their skills in a college sketch-comedy troupe, the trio's strategy was to throw as many jokes per minute at the screen as possible, the sillier the better, ensuring that enough of them stuck to cushion the ones that missed the mark. More from The Hollywood Reporter Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson Gush About Their Team-Up in 'The Naked Gun': "So Much Fun" 'The Naked Gun': First Reactions From the Premiere Stormtrooper Helmet From 'Star Wars: A New Hope' Sells for $256K at Auction Their 1982 ABC series spoofing crime procedurals, Police Squad!, lasted just six episodes. But ZAZ resurrected the idea for the big screen in 1988 with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (these guys seldom met an exclamation point they didn't love), which became a successful trilogy centering on Leslie Nielsen's bumbling but oblivious Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin. Cut to 31 years later … Nobody could accuse director Akiva Schaffer (who, like ZAZ, hails from a comedy trio, The Lonely Island) and his co-writers or producer Seth MacFarlane of lacking affection for the material. That's evident in the sweet homages to Nielsen and George Kennedy as Capt. Ed Hocken — O.J. Simpson not so much. The filmmakers follow the formula to a T in this legacy sequel or reboot or whatever you want to call it, enlisting the sons of Drebin (Liam Neeson) and Hocken (Paul Walter Hauser) as the new Police Squad team to provide plot continuity. Even if the movie kind of stalls midway as Schaffer struggles to balance the gags with the action of an overly elaborate crime plot, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments to keep nostalgic fans of the earlier films happy and maybe make some new converts. Just as Nielsen was established primarily as a dramatic actor before becoming a ZAZ linchpin in Airplane! and The Naked Gun, Neeson arrives trailing the gravitas of his late-career reinvention as a steely dispenser of vengeance and retribution, in Taken et al. The actor's dead serious delivery provides a subtle meta underlay as Frank Jr. takes down bad guys and tackles a master criminal, starting with a bank robbery prologue whose funniest jokes are given away in the trailer. The heist ties into the suspicious death of a brilliant tech engineer, whose electric vehicle went off the road. The victim's sister, Beth Davenport (MVP Pamela Anderson), seeks Frank's help in investigating what she's convinced was murder. He tells her to leave the detective work to the professionals, but they both turn up at a club run by her brother's boss, Edentech founder Richard Kane (Danny Huston). A mogul cut from the Elon Musk mold, Kane has a nefarious plan involving an amusingly named PLOT Device (Primordial Law of Toughness) with mind-altering properties, which is part of what he calls 'Project Inferno.' But before that gets activated, he cozies up to Frank with the gift of Police Squad's first electric cop car. Weary of dealing with angry calls from the mayor about Frank's blithe trail of city property destruction, police chief Davis (CCH Pounder) warns him to play nice with major donor Kane, since Police Squad's funding is at risk. That thread doesn't really go anywhere in the script by Dan Gregor, Doug Maud and Schaffer. Nor does Kane's talk of a 'Doomsday Giggle Bunker,' where entertainment will be provided by 'Weird Al' Yankovic — one of a handful of celebrity cameos. The same goes for Hauser's thankless role as Ed Hocken Jr., who plays straight man to Frank's self-serious dimwit, when the writers remember to include him. Even in a spoof of a police procedural, the crime under investigation needs a minimum of internal logic, but mastermind Kane's big scheme to destroy and remake Los Angeles — and possibly the world — to his own specifications pushes the movie almost into the absurdist espionage territory of the Austin Powers series. Senior or junior, Frank Drebin is an L.A. city cop, not Ethan Hunt. Luckily, Neeson and Anderson have enough spark to carry the film, not to mention great chemistry. I could have done without the padding of a winter cabin romantic interlude with a killer snowman — there's a difference between dumb and annoyingly stupid — but their scenes together are the high points throughout. Hearing Neeson express Frank's enduring anger about the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident, reflect on the cultural importance of the Black Eyed Peas, berate Beth for messing up his Buffy the Vampire Slayer recordings or break down the characters on Sex and the City after someone says 'Miranda rights' is a droll pleasure. His tough-guy physical comedy also scores, as he swats off armed criminals or bites off the barrel of a gun pointed at him without breaking a sweat. There's a moment early on in which he kneels beneath his father's photograph on the Police Squad wall of honor and says, 'I want to be just like you, but at the same time, completely different.' Which is pretty much the manifesto of anyone reviving a popular franchise after multiple decades of dormancy. The Naked Gun is at least a step up from the lifeless Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, to name one recent example. Neeson clearly is having a blast sending up his hyperviolent screen persona of recent years, and his enjoyment is infectious up to a point. But even when the narrative momentum sputters as the movie loads up on jokes at the expense of structure or character, Neeson's scenes with Anderson are bliss. Continuing her renaissance after The Last Showgirl, Anderson displays impeccable comic timing, never leaning too hard into a line when her breathy throwaway delivery can land a bigger laugh. At one point, Kane asks Beth, 'May I speak freely?' She replies, 'I prefer English.' In another moment, Frank, curious about where she went to college, asks, 'UCLA?' With only the tiniest frown of confusion, she tells him, 'I see it every day. I live here.' Dialogue like that may come from the hoariest school of comedy writing, but the charm of Anderson's buoyant screen presence keeps it fresh and funny. Beth is a character who defends her crime-solving instincts by saying, 'I write true crime stories, based on fictional crimes that I make up.' But it's crucial to Anderson's performance that Beth sails over every idiocy the script throws at her as if she's making perfect sense. I kept wishing the movie were as consistently entertaining and as sure of its footing as Anderson and Neeson are in their roles. But even if the laughs are hit-or-miss and the plotting shaky, there's enough inspired nonsense here to keep comedy-starved theatrical audiences engaged. To the filmmakers' credit, that includes the kind of retrograde, politically incorrect humor — the cops' anatomical appreciations of Beth are a hoot — that makes the movie feel almost like the old Naked Gun. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 40 Greatest Needle Drops in Film History The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A particular set of skills: how Liam Neeson went from ‘master actor' to deadpan Naked Gun spoofery
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'. At the age of 73, Neeson's current status as the star of a hit mainstream comedy – augmented by rumours of a romance with his co-star Pamela Anderson – is a world away from his emergence as a bona fide leading man in the early 1990s, when he put his teenage proficiency in boxing to good use in the Scotland-set drama The Big Man, bagged an Oscar nomination for playing Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List, and nobly donned plaid, kilt and sporran as 18th century highlander Rob Roy. Neeson's ability to project a weighty sense of gravitas in these wildly differing roles was compounded by his casting as Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, in Neil Jordan's 1996 biopic, the most politically sensitive – and closest to home – of his early leading roles. Born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, Neeson was raised Catholic but later said he was, ironically, inspired to become an actor after watching the firebrand Protestant leader Rev Ian Paisley preach, saying: 'It was incredible to watch this 6ft-plus man just bible-thumping away.' Neeson's career took its first unexpected deviation in the late 1990s when he was cast as Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, George Lucas's return to the Star Wars universe in 1999, with Lucas describing Neeson as 'a master actor, who the other actors will look up to'. This excursion into fantasy-blockbuster moviemaking was cemented with a role as principal antagonist Ra's al Ghul in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins in 2005, and lending his voice to Aslan the lion in the three Narnia films from the same period: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Neeson's standing in the industry also allowed him to take smaller roles in landmark films in the same period, including Gangs of New York and Love Actually. He had, however, lost his leading-man status in Hollywood, and it was the success of Taken – a French production, written by Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel – that returned him to the spotlight. Neeson later said he was 'stunned' by its impact, adding: 'I really thought it would be kind of a little side road from my so-called career. Really thought it would go straight to video.' Taken's box office receipts amounted to nine times its $25m (£19m) budget and virtually inaugurated the 'dad action' movie, thrillers featuring leads in late middle age; it is also the film with which Neeson is arguably now most identified with. Neeson went on to make a string of dad action films, including Unknown, Non-Stop, The Ice Road and Retribution. Neeson's reinvention as an action star coincided with a period of personal tragedy, after the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, in a skiing accident in 2009. The pair had met in 1993 while co-starring in a Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie, and married a year later. Neeson later said that grief over her death was partly responsible for his withdrawing from the lead role in Steven Spielberg's biopic of Abraham Lincoln, released in 2012, in which he was replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis. More recently Neeson was heavily criticised, and subsequently apologised, for saying that, in his youth, he had gone out looking to 'kill' a random black man in revenge for a sexual assault on a friend. Neeson had mentioned the incident in 2019 during the press tour for another action film, Cold Pursuit, later saying: 'The horror of what happened to my friend ignited irrational thoughts that do not represent the person I am. In trying to explain those feelings today, I missed the point and hurt many people.' Neeson's career, however, appears to have been relatively unaffected by the controversy, as well as his comment in 2018 that the recent wave of sexual misconduct allegations in the entertainment industry was 'bit of a witch-hunt'. With The Naked Gun commanding significant media attention – as much for speculation on Neeson's personal life as for the film itself – the actor's stock is as high as it has ever been.
The Guardian
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A particular set of skills: how Liam Neeson went from ‘master actor' to deadpan Naked Gun spoofery
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'. At the age of 73, Neeson's current status as the star of a hit mainstream comedy – augmented by rumours of a romance with his co-star Pamela Anderson – is a world away from his emergence as a bona fide leading man in the early 1990s, when he put his teenage proficiency in boxing to good use in the Scotland-set drama The Big Man, bagged an Oscar nomination for playing Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List, and nobly donned plaid, kilt and sporran as 18th century highlander Rob Roy. Neeson's ability to project a weighty sense of gravitas in these wildly differing roles was compounded by his casting as Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, in Neil Jordan's 1996 biopic, the most politically sensitive – and closest to home – of his early leading roles. Born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, Neeson was raised Catholic but later said he was, ironically, inspired to become an actor after watching the firebrand Protestant leader Rev Ian Paisley preach, saying: 'It was incredible to watch this 6ft-plus man just bible-thumping away.' Neeson's career took its first unexpected deviation in the late 1990s when he was cast as Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, George Lucas's return to the Star Wars universe in 1999, with Lucas describing Neeson as 'a master actor, who the other actors will look up to'. This excursion into fantasy-blockbuster moviemaking was cemented with a role as principal antagonist Ra's al Ghul in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins in 2005, and lending his voice to Aslan the lion in the three Narnia films from the same period: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Neeson's standing in the industry also allowed him to take smaller roles in landmark films in the same period, including Gangs of New York and Love Actually. He had, however, lost his leading-man status in Hollywood, and it was the success of Taken – a French production, written by Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel – that returned him to the spotlight. Neeson later said he was 'stunned' by its impact, adding: 'I really thought it would be kind of a little side road from my so-called career. Really thought it would go straight to video.' Taken's box office receipts amounted to nine times its $25m (£19m) budget and virtually inaugurated the 'dad action' movie, thrillers featuring leads in late middle age; it is also the film with which Neeson is arguably now most identified with. Neeson went on to make a string of dad action films, including Unknown, Non-Stop, The Ice Road and Retribution. Neeson's reinvention as an action star coincided with a period of personal tragedy, after the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, in a skiing accident in 2009. The pair had met in 1993 while co-starring in a Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie, and married a year later. Neeson later said that grief over her death was partly responsible for his withdrawing from the lead role in Steven Spielberg's biopic of Abraham Lincoln, released in 2012, in which he was replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis. More recently Neeson was heavily criticised, and subsequently apologised, for saying that, in his youth, he had gone out looking to 'kill' a random black man in revenge for a sexual assault on a friend. Neeson had mentioned the incident in 2019 during the press tour for another action film, Cold Pursuit, later saying: 'The horror of what happened to my friend ignited irrational thoughts that do not represent the person I am. In trying to explain those feelings today, I missed the point and hurt many people.' Neeson's career, however, appears to have been relatively unaffected by the controversy, as well as his comment in 2018 that the recent wave of sexual misconduct allegations in the entertainment industry was 'bit of a witch-hunt'. With The Naked Gun commanding significant media attention – as much for speculation on Neeson's personal life as for the film itself – the actor's stock is as high as it has ever been.
Metro
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Ghost legend Patrick Swayze was ‘the 10th choice' for iconic 90s movie
It's hard to imagine anyone else but Patrick Swayze leading the way in Ghost 35 years ago, but it turns out that he was quite far down the list of options for the role. The tear-jerking romantic drama was released on July 13, 1990, and instantly became one of the biggest hits of all time thanks to the star-studded cast, an amazing soundtrack and that pottery wheel. Jerry Zucker's film followed the ghost of murdered banker Sam Wheat (Patrick) as he attempted to warn girlfriend Molly Jensen (Demi Moore) about his killers, through the unwitting help of psychic Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg). The flick broke box office records and grossed more than $505million worldwide, landing five Oscar nominations and two wins – and, 35 years later, still regularly appears on the list of best romance movies. However, it could have been a very different story as those behind the scenes wanted an entirely different line-up. Speaking to Metro ahead of the milestone anniversary, noted casting director Janet Hirshenson revealed that Swayze – who died in 2009 at the age of 57 – was actually the 10th choice for the part. Unpacking the history, she lifted the lid on how the director was eventually tricked into letting him audition in the first place. 'We did a lot of movies with Patrick, I loved him very much. And that was a crazy casting,' she recalled, revealing that casting partner Jane Jenkins did most of the work on the 1990 classic. 'For Patrick's part, the studio only wanted to make it with one of 10 box office actors. The 10th choice was Patrick, but Jerry Zucker didn't want to cast him because he'd just seen Roadhouse, and didn't think he was right. 'He was Texan, and [the character] was supposed to be a banker. Jane said, 'Well, there are Texans that are bankers, you know!' They kept saying no…' While she didn't tell us who those other nine actors were, she confessed Jenkins 'concocted' a plan with Swayze's casting agent to get him the role. 'She made an appointment and Jerry went crazy,' Hirshenson continued. 'Jane and the agent planned it, so she called his agent and yelled at her, like 'How dare you set this up?!' Then she [told Jerry], 'I don't know, he's here… We've got to see him…' 'So, he came in and she read with him. It was the producer and Jerry, they came in and did the reading…. The producer was crying during the audition. At the end of the scene, Jerry Zucker jumped up and went, 'Well that's it!'' Ghost, also starring Tony Goldwyn, Rick Aviles, Vincent Schiavelli and Armelia McQueen, was met with huge praise from fans and critics alike when it first hit the big screen more than three decades ago. It currently commands a huge Rotten Tomatoes score of 80%, with many branding the movie 'perfect', 'classic', 'timeless' and 'brilliant'. Although Swayze and Moore were the main love story, it's fair to say that Goldberg stole every single scene she was in – she took home a best supporting actress Oscar for her efforts as Oda Mae, as well as a Bafta, a Golden Globe and a string of other trophies. But it turns out that Zucker wasn't originally sold on the Lion King legend, and initially declared that he didn't 'want to use her'. Reflecting on how she eventually landed the role, Hirshenson confessed that her audition took place in an airport. 'Whoopi Goldberg wasn't set and Patrick loved the idea also,' she added. 'Jerry and Patrick ended up going to Atlanta, where she was shooting a movie, and they met in the airport so Patrick could read with Whoopi. More Trending 'The two of them became very, very close friends. They had such great chemistry, I thought. 'Who else could have played her but Whoopi Goldberg?!' We totally agree. This article was originally published on June 12, 2020. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Hollywood star, 84, reveals he nearly replaced iconic actor as James Bond MORE: Amazon Prime adds 'worst movie ever made' with a surprisingly good cast MORE: Danny Devito gives rare update on close friend Jack Nicholson's welfare
