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In "The Naked Gun," we come upon nincompoop police detective Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) doing what he does best -- screwing everything up beyond all hope of repair. This time, at least, he has managed to derail a bank heist; however, within moments we see him shanking robbers with a sharpened lollipop while wearing a massively inappropriate pleated schoolgirl skirt. Frank is not one of L.A.'s finest -- although for many, many years, no one has seemed to notice, much less care.

So Drebin is soon assigned to a new case. There's a body out in Malibu -- a deceased tech bro named Davenport -- that's likely to get lost among the daily highway-carnage stats unless a sharp investigator can quickly eyeball the crime scene. For some reason, Drebin is thought to be the best man to do this. Afterward, he comes away suspecting foul play, as does the dead man's hot/grieving sister Beth (Pamela Anderson).

"The Naked Gun" is pretty much a bull's-eye reboot of the 1988 comedy hit (and its two sequels), which featured the blissfully inane (and now departed) Leslie Nielsen. For purposes of a remake, replacing Nielsen (a man who brought along fart pillows to TV talk-show appearances) had to be job number one. And while Neeson, whose cinematic resume includes everything from "Schindler's List" to Batman and "Star Wars" movies to late-career action hits like "Taken" and "Unknown," might not have been most filmmakers' first choice, he turned out, in his willingness to mock his own celebrated gravitas, to be an inspired one.

The story, by director Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island) and cowriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, is as blithely ridiculous as you'd expect. (A key thingy in the proceedings is a gadget labelled P.L.O.T. Device.) Neeson's Drebin Jr. is the son of Nielsen's long-deceased Frank Sr. and has clearly inherited his dad's baffling moronitude. ("I had to beat up a lotta henchmen tonight," he says at one point. "Men with daughters.") And Anderson, taking over the sultry foil function once fulfilled by Priscilla Presley, nicely sustains the career comeback she began last year with "The Last Showgirl." (Her Beth is a faux true-crime author -- "I write stories based on stories I make up" -- and she also gets an unhinged nightclub scene as a caterwauling scat singer.) Danny Huston is the sleek villain, Cane, who wants to, you know, destroy everything. And Paul Walter Hauser weighs in usefully as Dreben's Police Squad colleague Ed Hocken.

Does anyone make movies like this anymore -- movies in which the single-minded pursuit of pure lunacy is all that matters, coherence and deeper meanings be damned? Director Schaffer's extensive experience in off-the-trampled-path comedy (see the 2016 "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping") keeps the story moving right along for most of its refreshingly brief 85-minute runtime (no easy feat in a picture so heavily mined with gags). And he draws from Neeson a middle-aged dumbbell hunkiness that's a snug fit for Drebin in every situation, whether battling an infestation of bees and balloons or joining with Beth in a wintry round of fantasy snowman sex. And the avalanche of memorable lines helps, of course. "She had a body that could carry her head," Frank says of his special lady, "and a butt that seemed to say, 'Hello, I'm a talking butt.'"

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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