If the only measure of a film comedy is whether or not it makes its audience laugh, then I suppose we can claim Akiva Schaffer’s new The Naked Gun reboot is something of a success. It is honestly that simple: that is, after all, the ultimate requirement of the genre, and even I – who definitely laughed less than the crowd at its Melbourne preview screening – nonetheless found myself regularly amused.

Of course the reason that the film scores so many laughs is that it makes so many attempts. This is a tightly wound 85-minute barrage of gags and jokes. Should one fail to hit, another will come up directly behind it. By the time to credits roll, we are all more likely to remember the one great joke that landed over the four that did not. It is the sort of ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ approach that typified the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker comedies of the 1980s including Airplane!, Top Secret, and – indeed – the original Naked Gun of 1988. To an extent, Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is an effective replacement, and star Liam Neeson a similarly deadpan presence to original star Leslie Neilson.

Neeson plays Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin, son of Neilson’s Frank Drebin Sr. While investigating an apparent suicide, he soon runs into femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) as well as technology billionare Richard Cane (Danny Huston). The former is the sister of the apparent suicide, while the latter clearly had a hand in the death, and – ah really who cares, it is all a basic framework for gags anyway.

It is still a weaker picture than David Zucker’s 1988 version, but then again that was in itself a weaker iteration than Zucker’s earlier TV series Police Squad. That series deftly parodied the old TV police procedurals of the 1960s, whereas Schaffer is essentially parodying The Naked Gun itself. It is ultimately a photocopy of a photocopy, and while I may have laughed at the jokes I remember laughing harder in the 1980s.

It is worth singling out co-star Pamela Anderson for praise. She seems to be in a middle of mid-career resurgence at the moment, and she delivers some pitch-perfect work here. Likewise Danny Huston provides a strong presence as the film’s central villain – even if, perhaps even because, he resembles a classic era James Bond antagonist.

These sorts of films are often described as ‘critic-proof’, which makes a certain kind of sense. Quality is really a secondary consideration if one is simply looking for a film to make them laugh. You can laugh at The Naked Gun. You may laugh more than I did. It is reasonable enough disposable entertainment, but it doesn’t deserve a 500-word review. Really all it warrants is a shrug. It’s fine. Go watch it when it opens in Australian cinemas. You might laugh. Maybe a lot, or maybe hardly at all – but probably a bit, and then within a few days you will have forgotten all about it.