A few weeks before Liam Neeson ‘s Frank Drebin Jr. bumbled onto movie screens, IndieWire critic David Ehrlich published an essay with the audacious title, “ The Naked Gun Is the Most Important Movie of the Summer .” Beyond just the hopes that Neeson and director Akiva Scheffer could recreate bizarre energy of the Leslie Nielsen originals, the essay captures the modern movie fan’s desperation for the return of mid-budget studio comedies. “Almost everything is ‘funny,'” Ehrlich says of our current state of blockbuster IP films. “Almost nothing is a comedy.”

Of course, the studio comedy never truly went away. Just this year, we had the incredible One of Them Days and Tim Robinson brought his absurdist humor to cinemas with Friendship . But neither of those movies captured the p

See Full Page