Cane, the film’s central antagonist, is a billionaire oligarch looking to tear society apart and rebuild it in his image. His plan involves using a P.L.O.T. device to trigger the population’s lizard brain, returning them to their “natural” state, “calming up” society into a kill-or-be-killed culture. Meanwhile, as the 99% prove their strength by destroying the old world, Cane and his billionaire buddies will be weathering this in a series of underground bunkers, watching Weird Al perform “Amish Paradise” to their black hearts’ content. It’s all built on Cane’s imposed social hierarchy, the Primordial Law Of Toughness, a violent social Darwinism that would be ludicrous if it weren’t so close to reality.
More than a specific movie or genre, The Naked Gun spoofs the ideology of modern Silicon Valley reactionaries—the kind obsessed with birth rates, white genocide, and doomsday prepping. These creeps are all over The Naked Gun, from its commercials for Gorilla Nut and Muscle Slime to Cane’s beloved testicle tanning machine, which leapt into the culture via the 2022 Tucker Carlson special The End Of Men.
Ball-burning was just one of the many dubious health claims Carlson made in his special, but Cane bakes End Of Men into his whole ethos. He’s even aesthetically committed to this bit, triggering his device via a bomb hidden in a pair of giant testicles that descend into an MMA event at the “PonziScheme.com Arena” in the film’s climax. After saddling combat sports enthusiasts with new insecurities about the size and effectiveness of their ejaculate, Cane wants them to do his dirty work for him. Even the villain’s throwaway grievances reflect tiresome, entitled discourses over language, like the insufferable campaign to bring back things men “can no longer do or say.” Bringing back an ableist slur, Joe Rogan said earlier this year, is “one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.” That every man has a potential outrage-spouter in his pocket makes the P.L.O.T. device a not-so-subtle metaphor for the types of anti-social media Eddington uses as ammo.
But not to worry, the Woke Mind Virus has not infected The Naked Gun. It simply uses a very real, stupid, and dangerous ideology to provide the comedy with a foundation for jokes that people will understand. The Naked Gun movies aren’t political per se, but they’re not apolitical either, particularly Naked Gun 2 1/2. In that one, Robert Goulet stars as the sequel’s villain Quentin Hapsburg, an oil magnate looking to squash George H.W. Bush’s renewable energy plans. Directed and co-written by David Zucker, the film expresses Zucker’s environmental advocacy and confused understanding of Republicans’ extreme lack thereof. Drebin Sr., too, as a character, spoofed not only Joe Friday but the hard-C conservatism of Dirty Harry. Drebin doesn’t care what “Shakespeare in the Park” is; if he sees five weirdos in togas stabbing a man to death in front of 100 people, he shoots the bastard.
Drebin Jr. keeps that critique alive, partially by maintaining that satirical violence-first approach (Who’s going to arrest him? Other cops?) and partially through Neeson’s deadpan, which has a tinge of desperation that tends to haunt the protagonists of modern cop media, from True Detective to Den Of Thieves—not to mention Neeson death-wish vehicles like Taken. These movies uphold the idea that there’s only one man who can save the world, and only through his lawlessness does he win the day. The characters haven’t changed—they’ve just mostly retreated to geezer-teaser productions in Eastern Europe—and Frank Drebin hasn’t either. Underscoring aging men’s stubbornness with a perfectly wrong sentiment, Jr. sums up his film’s critique by saying that old men really are the smartest, sexiest, most exceptional people on the planet.
