Then, Leslie Neilson and the AIRPLANE writer/directors created a TV series that everyone seemed to like, but no one seemed to watch because POLICE SQUAD only lasted a handful of episodes... But there's a thing called "cult following," and SQUAD had it in droves... igniting THE NAKED GUN movie franchise starring Nielson partnered with another deadly-serious veteran actor George Kennedy... The difference between the reboot's modern-day-veteran star Liam Neeson and Leslie Nielson (or Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves for that matter) is the latter came from a time before affected sarcasm turned everything (from war movies to action movies to horror movies) into partial comedies... Which, back in the 1980's, turned Neilson into a kind of thawed-out neanderthal where the humor relies on him being stuck in a time he doesn't (or his character Frank Drebin doesn't) understand...But Neeson, whose done every genre under the sun ranging from historical dramas to semi-comedies to a barrage of high-octane action-flicks, simply understands too much, so it's really no big deal that he's a hard-nosed cop surrounded by a myriad of jokey gags... he can simply embrace or ignore them and it doesn't really matter... Meanwhile, some of the jokes are kinda funny, some are basically ignored, some even seem made to be ignored and very few make you laugh out loud since somewhere within this NAKED GUN reboot is a genuine detective drama that didn't want to be humorous at all... For example, had they cast Liam as the new Dirty Harry, there would be no difference, really... but neither would work because neither franchise should have been rebooted in the first place.
