With Liam Neeson’s revival of The Naked Gun about to hit theatres, Pluto TV serves up the original Leslie Nielsen spoof and its two sequels
With Liam Neeson stepping into the shoes of a Canadian comedy legend in a new remake of The Naked Gun, the original laugh-a-minute movies are available for free on the Pluto TV streaming service.
Neeson has been best known for dramatic roles — particularly when utilizing his “particular set of skills” in action hit Taken and its sequels — before making a segue into comedy with The Naked Gun, playing Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the original character played by the late, great Leslie Nielsen.
While the Canadian actor, who died in 2010, is remembered primarily for his comedies, it’s easy to forget that he’d been a fixture on film and TV screens since the 1950s in purely dramatic roles. It wasn’t until 1980’s Airplane! that he struck comedy gold, his deadpan delivery of goofy dialogue propelling him to the biggest success he’d ever experienced when he was well into his 50s.
As Nielsen explained in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, his Hollywood career had taken him from leading man in films like Forbidden Planet to supporting roles (including the captain of the doomed cruise ship in The Poseidon Adventure) to playing bad guys (Barbra Streisand’s Nuts, his final non-comedic role). And while he knew he was funny, he’d never had the opportunity to demonstrate it onscreen, and had accepted he never would — until Airplane! came along.
“When I read the [Airplane!] script, I knew exactly what they were after,” he said. “It was the greatest break of my life, in a sense, that I ended up working with people who spotted me for being the closet comedian that I was.”
That role led the creators of Airplane! — Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker — to cast Nielsen as dimwitted detective Frank Drebin in Police Squad!, a TV cop show spoof that shared the same sensibility. While the series was short-lived (Police Squad! was cancelled after just four episodes aired), they resurrected Drebin on the big screen in The Naked Gun, cementing Nielsen as a bona fide comedy star and spawning a pair of equally silly sequels.
“They had written something that was just wonderfully dumb and funny,” he told Fresh Air. “And they knew that if [we] approached their material with the same seriousness and the same gravity with which we approached our police television shows that we were doing, that it would be very funny.”
Whether Neeson manages to experience his own late-in-life comedy career surge remains to be seen, but for Nielsen, the Naked Gun movies proved to be an unexpected gift that delighted him as much as they did viewers.
“I never ever thought I could be funny anywhere but off-camera,” he remarked in 2008 interview with Den of Geek. “The second career, for it has been just that, came as a total surprise.”
In addition to airing on Pluto TV’s Summer of Movies Channels, all three Naked Gun movies will also air during the first week of August on the streamer’s Comedy Movies Channel and TV Comedy Movies Channel. The films are also available on VOD from Monday, July 28 through to Thursday, August 14.
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! airs Saturday, July 26, on Pluto TV’s Summer of Movies Channel
The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear airs Saturday, July 26. (repeating Sunday July 27), on Pluto TV’s Summer of Movies Channel
The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult airs Sunday, July 27 on Pluto TV’s Summer of Movies Channel