The Revived Naked Gun Shoots and Scores

“What were the funniest jokes?” a reporter from Germany’s NDR public radio network asked me in a live interview as my 10-year-old son and I exited the Cologne cinema, where Die Nackte Kanone, better known as The Naked Gun, had its first performance this summer. We watched the film in English, but my German was good enough to tell a foreign television audience that I could not focus on any particular element of writer-director Akiva Schaffer’s revival of the law-enforcement spoof, which unreeled gag after gag. The totality of the experience brought me back to my teenage years, when the first three Naked Gun films appeared.