The Naked Gun (2025)

 

Those familiar with SNL alum/writer/actor/director Akiva Schaffer's humor will be better prepared than the uninitiated for his revival of a 30+-year-old franchise that many probably assumed was dead.

With a bit of Hollywood magic -- and the deep, deep pockets of a dozen producers, including Schaffer and king of animated serials Seth MacFarlane -- The Naked Gun is back, locked and loaded and delivering about 80 minutes of giggles, guffaws and gags for those game enough to take it on.

Leslie Nielsen was the original inept detective Frank Drebin back in the '80s and '90s, and in the fourth installment Liam Neeson is his equally inept son, Frank Jr., who is, without authorization, tracking a tech genius (Danny Huston) who has a cockamamie plan for world domination (or something) using a device brilliantly labeled in the first minutes of the film as "p.l.o.t. device."

Drebin is joined in the investigation by his partner, son of the original Ed Hocken (George Kennedy), Ed Jr., an always-winning Paul Walter Hauser, and grieving widow Beth Davenport, played by Pamela Anderson. (The Neeson and Anderson romance has kept Tinseltown beat writers busy for the past few months.)

The picture's dialogue is twisted and the sight gags are fast and furious -- or maybe that should be "the dialogue is fast and furious and the sight gags are twisted." In either it's a wonderful distraction from, but as I told the theater manager who asked me what I thought of the picture, "You can't drift off or you'll miss something."

Nobody 2

 

Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto moves 2021's bone-crusher Nobody a few steps forward in "2" as Bob Odenkirk's hilariously doleful but lethal fixer Hutch Mansell takes his long-suffering wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and surly and increasingly indifferent kids Brady and Sammy (Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath) on vacation to an amusement park from his childhood, Plummerville -- his only pleasant memory about being reared by his father, David (Christopher Lloyd), who comes along.

While on holiday, Hutch discovers an elaborate criminal enterprise managed by the sheriff (Colin Hanks) with the cooperation of the park's owner (John Ortiz), who much pay off a debt amassed by his father, the original owner. Hutch is warned by his handler (Colin Salmon) not to interfere in the operation because it's run by the ruthless Lendina (Sharon Stone), whose "scorched-earth" approach to vengeance is legend in the underground.

But Hutch being Hutch, he can't avoid acting on instinct when his kids are disrespected in the arcade. He puts half of the sheriff's henchmen in the hospital and draws down the wrath of Lendina for a ridiculously elaborate showdown on the midway. Adopted-brother Harry (RZA), who was mostly off-camera in the first film, knows the hammer is about to fall and mounts up to join Hutch and the others for the fireworks.

This series -- which owes much to the highly lucrative and addictive John Wick franchise -- is generally light on narrative and heavy on mayhem, but Odenkirk is as engaging a performer as one is likely to find, and so Nobody 2 goes down easily as a summertime outing.

It's like a waterslide that's good for at least one go on a hot afternoon.

Highest 2 Lowest II

 

Spike Lee's latest film Highest 2 Lowest poses an interesting moral quandary for its lead character -- music mogul David King (Denzel Washington) -- but leaves the audience with an unclear message.

King is trying to save his company from being bought by an aggressive competitor when word comes that his son has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. When police discover the kidnapped boy is not King's son, Trey, but the son of King's driver, he is relieved that he'll be able to hold onto the 17.5 million dollar ransom.

Those around him are stunned by his coldness, and his driver (Jeffrey Wright) is tossed by feelings of confusion and disrespect, not just from King, but from the police who seem to value his son's life less.

A series of counter-arguments from those in King's circle disrupts his resolve. A business partner asks him about the optics if he refuses to pay and the boy is harmed or killed. King responds that the public's memory is short and the fallout would pass.

His son presses him to pay the money for his friend, who is like a brother to him, using language regularly heard on the hip-hop recordings King has made millions producing and promoting. King responds by threatening to beat his son for disrespecting him.

It will surprise no one that the hero eventually relents and agrees to deliver the ransom -- with assurances from the police that they will retrieve the money and capture the kidnapper. But the plan does not lighten his burden, which he and his driver, a former convict, later handle in street fashion, more or less.

Lee's film, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 classic High and Low, toys with Shakespearean themes of hubris, greed and distrust, but, rather disappointingly, offers a conclusion that leaves the hero mostly whole -- even though those around him have been damaged -- bodily and spiritually.

Why was this choice made? What were Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox trying to say as they modified the original ending, which was a meeting between the extorted businessman and the envious kidnapper, to include a coda that assured viewers all would be well for the Kings.

Were they trying to anticipate audience pushback if the hero was indeed left at his lowest point, as the title suggested?

Did they imagine audiences would be forgiving of a man who, despite attributing his actions to divine guidance, demonstrated repeatedly through word and deed that he was moved almost exclusively by material gain?

Maybe Lee and Fox placed the real message in the last scene between King and his driver, who was recovering in a hospital from injuries. The driver says he won't be working for King anymore and hoped to move on with his son. King said he understood, and the two parted with a dap and a homie sign-off, but the look on the driver's face suggested it wasn't just physical injuries he suffered on behalf of the King who had, if just briefly, set himself above his friend.

Now there is something to think about!

Highest 2 Lowest

Spike Lee's latest joint is a tribute to both the Japanese master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) and to Lee's frequent collaborator Denzel Washington; they've done five movies together.

Highest 2 Lowest is a reworking of Kurosawa's 1963 crime story High and Low, in which a high-powered business executive's plans to buy control of his company are disrupted when the son of his driver is mistakenly kidnapped by extortionists hoping to ransom the executive's son. 

Lee moves the story to his beloved New York -- the stunning opening cityscape is cleverly and ironically set against the background of Norm Lewis's Oh, What a Beautiful Morning! from Oklahoma. Washington plays a legendary music impresario and producer named David King (Lee has a way with on-the-nose character names) sitting on top of the world in his high-rise penthouse, with his impossibly glamorous wife, Pam, played by Ilfenesh Hadera, and their dutiful 17-year-old son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). King's trusted companion is his driver Paul (an always-welcome Jeffrey Wright), whose son Kyle (Wright's son Elijah) is the younger King's doppelganger and best friend.

King has borrowed heavily to counter an offer to purchase his recording empire, Stacking Hits, from an aggressive across-the-river competitor and is ready to make the announcement to his board when he receives a call that his son has been kidnapped and the ransom is $17.5 million in Swiss currency. 

King decides to redirect the money he's gathered for the purchase to the ransom, but when the police discover the kidnappers have the wrong boy, he finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. Pay the ransom and lose his business or buy the business and condemn the boy to death. 

Nearly all of the film's emotional tension comes in the exchanges between King and Paul, which reveals the rich social layering Alan Fox's screenplay builds into a story that in other places suffers from troubling narrative holes, continuity glitches and lapses in logic. 

As a Spike Lee production, music factors heavily into building characters and spaces, and Lee has never been afraid to devote running time to sound and color. This picture includes a wonderful performance by Eddie Palmieri and the Salsa Orchestra, an extended number by rap star and featured player A$AP Rocky and stirring closing ballad by British singer Aiyana-Lee. 

But, as it ever was, this is Denzel Washington's showpiece and covers lots of dramatic turf in depicting a man who has been sure about nearly everything in life, now facing financial and spiritual uncertainty.

Together

 

One could understate the central premise of Aussie writer/ director / visual effects artist Michael Shanks' debut feature film Together as the story of a young-ish couple with commitment issues.

Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) have been dating for a decade with little forward momentum. Some of this is attributed to Tim's horrifying discovery of his whacked-out mother in bed with his long dead father's putrefying corpse.

Millie, who barely contains her frustration with her "boy partner," decides to take a job as a teacher in a remote elementary school. (It's not clear if we're in Shanks' native Australia or some other locale.) Tim, a musician with limited prospects, agrees to come along. To Franco's credit, Tim's diffidence is palpable to the audience. That and Millie's sharply pointed barbs make these static millennials as annoying as their real-world counterparts.

But both Millie and Tim grow out of their initial pitiable self-involvement as they begin to experience unusual attraction to one another, after falling into a subterranean cavern that contains vestiges of a cult that practiced weird bonding ceremonies, according to Millie's oily school principal (David Herriman).

Franco and Brie give their all to Shanks' evolving grotesqueries, flinging about and contorting themselves as the ties that bind grow tighter and Millie and Tim get over their nagging, bloody commitment issues.