It’s fair to say that there was a healthy dose of scepticism about this Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson and without an Abrahams or Zucker in sight, but the response to it has been pretty positive. As others have noted, Liam Neeson is probably the movie star whose name most closely resembles that of Leslie Nielsen, and here he plays his character’s son – Frank Drebin, Jr. If you’d said at the start of the year that the only Mission: Impossible music that Lorne Balfe would write this year would be for The Naked Gun and not for Mission: Impossible itself then you would probably have been ridiculed given Joel McNeely was attached to this and Balfe was attached to M:I at the time – but it’s funny how things work out. There’s a good reason why M:I music appears here (watch the movie) – the direct quote comes in “Project Inferno” but “My Name is Frank Drebin, Jr”, “Have a Nice Trip” and “The Main Event” are great action cues written in that same style. I don’t know what happened to McNeely – perhaps he turned up and his boss was already on the scene, and he’s writing his music in Statesville Prison from now on.
Also in the score is a great romantic cue (“There She Was Again”) and a David Arnold / Bond-style piece of romance-imbued suspense (“Something Fowl”) at the start, and a lovely rousing finale cue (“Two Kodiak Bears / Press Conference”) – as well as a blockbuster Gordon Goodwin arrangement of Ira Newborn’s classic Police Squad! theme (itself essentially a riff on Count Basie’s theme from M Squad!). The brief album also features a couple of songs – one each for Neeson and Anderson – and a great piece of smoky jazz (“Turkey Talk”). Balfe has taken the basic Newborn approach to the original films (and series) of mixing big band, jazz and exaggerated romance and added straight-faced modern action music to the mix and it’s all very entertaining. Also, if I ever meet him, I’ll be sure to compliment him on his beaver. It seems that everywhere I go, something reminds me of him.
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