Remembering Naked Gun 33 1/3rd

Naked Gun 33 1/3rd: The Final Insult is not the kind of film that tends to be accorded much of a place in cinematic history, but it still seems to me to rate a mention that way nonetheless. Looking back I think of it as, if the least-regarded and lowest-grossing of the three Naked Gun films, the last real product of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team's collaboration (as a sequel to the last film where all three were credited together, the first Naked Gun), and more broadly, the last movie to come out of that broader boom of the gag comedy so clearly underway in the '70s and gone bust in the '90s to have enjoyed any real measure of popular success--or, more arguably, offered much in the way of entertainment. (Later movies in the decade like Jane Austen's Mafia! worked a good deal less well, and the revival of the form a few years on that shortly came to be dominated by the Friedburg-Seltzer team seems, at best, an anticlimax after movies like this one, never mind a Blazing Saddles.) If "historical" in a more Trivial Pursuit kind of way one can also remark it as the last acting role in which O.J. Simpson was seen (the movie actually came out in the fall of 1994, after we had all seen the Odyssey of the White Bronco, and the more astute thought to ourselves "We are never going to hear the end of this"), while also the high point of Anna Nicole Smith's cinematic career (which, alas, I was disappointed to see did not continue much after this--just a couple of straight-to-video releases and then, done).

Personally speaking, I can add that I think of the film every year at Oscar time. While the film, as less friendly critics remark, is more uneven than its predecessors, and I could have done without a good deal of the film's middle stretch, the last act, where the goings-on center on the year's Oscar ceremony, really is inspired--and every year as we hear about the lousy ratings the Academy's once-widely watched ceremony got, I find myself thinking that this bit of the film is way, way more entertaining than the, to use the film critic David Walsh's words, "scripted, sanitized and embalmed" productions the Academy stages for the public (without ever thinking "Hey, maybe that's got something to do with why people don't watch anymore"). Indeed, Walsh's coverage of the ceremony in itself tends to be more entertaining than anything they put together--even when he is not satirically presenting what he would have liked to see instead of what we actually got.