Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994)

Peter Segal's 1994 directorial debut arrives as the third installment of a franchise built on the corpse of a short-lived television series, and it carries no ambition beyond the placement of the next gag. Leslie Nielsen returns as Frank Drebin, a man whose incompetence is played as slapstick rather than as any recognizable condition, and the plot (a bomber, a prison, an Academy Awards ceremony) exists purely to hold the sketches apart. There is no thesis here. No argument is advanced about how we should live, whom we should include, or what we owe the planet. That absence is total and, in its way, restful.

What the film does offer is a sequence at a sperm clinic, a seduction scene in which Tanya Peters is revealed to be trans and Frank recoils in nausea, and a closing joke in which a brown-skinned infant prompts Frank to chase Nordberg across the delivery room. These are the opposite of advocacy. They are the residue of a coarser comedic era, presented without comment and without apology. Anna Nicole Smith's physique is ogled for the length of her screen time. Priscilla Presley's Jane wants a baby and a husband who comes home. The film does not interrogate any of this. It does not interrogate anything.

The result is a comedy that asks nothing of its audience but laughter, and receives a respectable amount of it. It opened at number one, collected two Golden Raspberry awards, and was sued successfully by Annie Leibovitz over a poster. Across every measure of contemporary social instruction, the ledger is blank. A zero, entered with a certain admiration.