Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult

Naked Gun 33 1/3 is a feast of pointless, shamelessly silly, almost consistently funny gags. Another comic gem. [18 Mar 1994, p.C1]

The spoof-policier series is about non-stop gags, pure and simple, and this third instalment, for all its lax plotting and ludicrous characterisation, remains infinitely more pleasurable than sticking you face in a fan. Indeed, the five minutes of the pre-credits sequence are quite possibly the funniest since the talkies came in. Thereafter, it's hit and miss, but the hits are so frequent and spot-on, you'd have to be dead (and buried) not to find the film painfully hilarious. Inspired, inspirational, gloriously inane. Read full review

Only one filmmaking team should be allowed to make sequels: The Naked Gun people. In Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, they reach maximum velocity immediately. Naked 3 sets such a great pace at the beginning, it can't possibly keep up. Inevitably, the movie has its slower sections, coming almost to a halt in a slapstick finale at the Oscars. But wherever you are in the story, there's always something funny coming at you. Read full review

It occurred to me, watching the film, that what Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley do here is not easy, and is done well. It would be fatal to the movie if either one ever betrayed the slightest suggestion that they know funny things are going on. They play everything on a level of seriousness that would be appropriate, say, for a 1960s TV cop drama. Their timing is impeccable. And they provide the sure, strong center around which the madness revolves. Read full review

Naked Gun 33 1/3 has a sluggish, one-gag-at-a- time rhythm, and it aims at too many soft targets. Aside from the Oscar sequence, the movie’s big satirical coup is a send-up of prison-escape pictures (yawn). Read full review

More explosive laughs from Leslie Nielsen, Pricilla Presley, and friends (George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson) in another madcap police farce that is often so funny you lose track of the terrorist story. Alas, the comic pace is not sustained to the finish, but maybe it couldn't be. [18 Mar 1994, p.C]

This third installment of the silly and often hilarious send-up of cop cliches is slower to start than the earlier Naked Gun movies. As always, it is a scattershot mix of throwaway lines, topical references and sight gags (a newspaper headline that reads: Dyslexia for Cure Found). Read full review

David Zucker and Segal seem to thrive on the formulaic tomfoolery that propels these rapid-fire spoofs. Naked Gun 33 1/3, as pointlessly plotted as ever, manages to be not only still funny but energetically slapped together and occasionally inventive. Read full review

Some of the gags are side-splitters, some just sit on the screen. But the film would have to be a great deal worse to prevent Naked Gun die-hards from lining up. [18 Mar 1994, p.F6]

There's a little less hilarity in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult than in the first two films, but there's still enough slapstick firepower to put it across. There's efficiency in Peter Segal's direction, but never real zaniness, and in the gaps between the sight gags lurks the onset of sequelitis. [18 Mar 1994, p.68]

In this defiantly ridiculous movie, David Zucker, of the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Airplane! movies, once again unleashes on the world the sexiest (and dumbest) 66-year-old accident-prone cop in the history of the movies, Leslie Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin. The jokes still come at you in a dense Hellzapoppin' blizzard. But more of them seem crude, mean-spirited, a little sour. Read full review

You know what you're in for, and you get what you want (especially those die-hards who read ALL of the end credits), but you'll also get the feeling that you've seen it all before. [18 Mar 1994, p.D3]

Once again, the anchor aboard this ship of fools is the drolly doltish Leslie Nielsen, who can deliver lines like "I like my sex the way I play basketball - one on one, with as little dribbling as possible" as if they were first-class mail. Let's hope Zucker and Co. quit while they are ahead. [18 Mar 1994, p.4D]

It's not quite up to, or maybe down to, the level of the first two movies. But the movie rolls to a wildly funny climax at the Oscar presentations, where Drebin is mistaken for Phil Donahue. Surely, there are enough belly laughs and knee slaps to make this film worth your time. And stop calling me Shirley. [23 Mar 1994, p.6F]