‘THE NAKED GUN’ RATED PG-13
  
The genius of “The Naked Gun” franchise, from the brilliant comedic creative team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (known as ZAZ), originated with the short-lived television series “Police Squad!” that the ABC network had the lack of good sense to keep on the air after only six episodes.

That the ZAZ team created the disaster spoof film “Airplane!,” starring Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, and featuring Leslie Nielsen, among other notable actors like Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves, was inspiration for more in the genre.
  
From the box office success of this now iconic comedy film, ZAZ was apparently ready to create another film spoofing a serious police procedural, and instead came up with the series “Police Squad!” starring Leslie Nielsen as the inept, bumbling Los Angeles police lieutenant Frank Drebin.
  
For the TV show and the movies, Frank Drebin could easily be a caricature of Jack Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday in the Sixties series “Dragnet,” where his clipped and to the point questioning of suspects or witnesses to get only the facts was ripe for parody.
  
While ABC cancelled “Police Squad!,” the one season of the television show has attained cult status. This classic lampoon of cop shows is worth finding, and maybe the only option is to purchase it in on Amazon.
  
Once a serious actor, Nielsen’s turn to comedy resulted in pure gold because of his deadpan expression and his talent for wordplay of non-sequiturs and smart punchlines, along with being oblivious to almost everything around him.
  
Nielsen, of course, went on to star in ZAZ’s 1988 film “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!,” where crass humor, visual gags, slapstick mayhem, and the blatant incompetence of the squad combined for zany hilarity.
  
Now three decades later, the ZAZ team is no longer involved (one member passed away last year) and continuing the Frank Drebin legacy falls to the character’s son, Frank Drebin Jr., whose mother was Priscilla Presley’s Jane Spencer.
  
The gravelly voiced Liam Neeson makes an interesting choice for Frank Drebin, Jr. in the rebooted “The Naked Gun,” where he’s as clueless as his deceased father, whose portrait hangs at the Police Squad’s wall of legends and whose spirit is later channeled through an owl.
  
Where Leslie Nielsen’s appealing deadpan delivery was relatively flat and mellow, Neeson’s tone is sometimes closer in attitude to the intensity he brought to his character of retired CIA agent Bryan Mills in the “Taken” franchise, except that his Drebin doesn’t have any discernible set of skills.
  
Not operating by the book, the film begins with Drebin foiling a bank robbery by showing up disguised as a little school girl who turns a giant lollipop into a weapon that subdues some of the criminals and precipitates a violent melee.
  
Flouting the rules, Drebin runs afoul of Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) who threatens to disband the Police Squad, but then dispatches him with his partner Ed Hocken, Jr. (Paul Walker Hauser), the son of the late George Kennedy’s character in the film series, to investigate a fatal car crash.
  
The crashed electric vehicle turns out to have been involved in the bank robbery, which ties into oily tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston) as the mastermind of the heist that was a cover for his henchman Sig (Kevin Durand) to pilfer a gadget from a safety deposit box.
  
The man who died in the crash was deemed to have been a suicide, but his sister Beth Davenport (the alluring Pamela Anderson as a femme fatale) is convinced that foul play was orchestrated by Cane and she’s determined to investigate on her own.
  
Before too long, Beth teams up with Drebin for sleuthing, which turns into an inevitable romantic angle that has its share of indecency during an intimate evening when a snowman joins in a sexual triangle that leads to murderous jealousy. 
  
Then, there’s one of Cane’s henchmen following Drebin and Beth to use infrared binoculars to spy on them with the result that the thermal imaging appears to show Beth engaging in a sexual act that is not PG-13 rated material. If one is curious, the scene is in the trailer.
  
The climax comes down to Cane’s disturbed plan to the citizens of Los Angeles into a scenario straight out of “The Purge” where all crime is legal for a half-day window. Here it’s a lot of ridiculous street fighting triggered through phones. 
  
Running at a fast pace of 85 minutes, “The Naked Gun” does not concern itself with plot so much as with its aim to be as raucously funny and absurd as possible. Not all madcap wordplay and sight gags land gut-busting punches, but the odds are decent enough. 
 
What “The Naked Gun” boils down to is a wacky comedy in the spirit of the original such that it achieves for the most part its goal. The film merits being seen in a theater where audience laughter becomes contagious.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.