It Flicks da police.
By ’88, the image of the American police officer on screen had been pretty well-established. Hollywood spent decades reinforcing the cop as a figure of order and moral fortitude. These characters didn’t simply enforce the law, they were lower-case-s superheroes who stopped at nothing to defend the greater good. On TV especially, police procedurals created an entire pop shorthand from the weekly repetition and rhythm: clean setups, crisp resolutions, and a consistent framing of law enforcement as competence personified.
They only needed the facts, and they always got their man.
The Naked Gun doesn’t even challenge that formula, it replicates it beat for beat. Every trope remains intact: the dramatic briefing, the boss’ reprimand, the press conference, the last-minute chase. What gets challenged is the level of friction between those scenes and the logic threads holding them together. This is a film that uses the structure of a serious cop thriller to test how much absurdity it can hold before collapsing. It’s not concerned with deconstructing the genre, it’s just happy to abuse its visual and narrative language.
There’s no larger argument being made. Like ZAZ’s take on the Airline disaster fad, or WW2 spy and Elvis films, what the film does offer is a very specific form of parody: one that relies entirely on the audience recognising the patterns being distorted. It assumes our familiarity with the genre’s rituals, from the opening flashing light POV to the stoic noir voiceovers. Naked Gun’s not out to break these well-worn patterns, but it does stun them. And pushes them over the edge. And maybe the movie runs over them once or twice, but there’s always a clear love for the classic cop outings. And ZAZ left their fingerprints all over them. -Pop
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! landed on home video this week in 1989, after a December 2nd, 1988 theatrical release.