Is there a cop to save the world? on Canal Plus: successful reboot! (critical)
The fourth part of the saga remains faithful to its scat and burlesque fundamentals. A shot of political incorrectness within which Liam Neeson reveals an irresistible comic nature.
The reboot of Is There a Cop, with Liam Neeson as Franck Drebin’s son, had a small success at the cinema (a little over $100 million in revenue worldwide), but was disavowed by David Zucker, the director of the first two films in the saga, accusing producer Seth McFarlane of having “completely missed” the spirit of the ZAZ. At Première, we nevertheless appreciated this Is there a cop to save the world?, broadcast for the first time this Friday evening on Canal Plus, and available for streaming on MyCanal. Our review:
This summer is therefore the summer of all comebacks. After the Remember… franchise last summer and the return of the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis duo in the sequel to Freaky Friday, here is the Is There a Cop… saga re-emerging on our big screens? for a fourth part, more than 30 years after the previous one (Hollywood which followed The Queen and The President), which we didn’t necessarily see coming. And this for an infinite number of reasons. Because Leslie Nielsen, the brilliant interpreter of Lieutenant Frank Drebin, died in 2010.
Because this project announced in December… 2013 with Ed Helms (Very Bad Trip) as headliner seemed dead and buried all this time. Because American comedy now tends to desert the field of cinema to develop in series. But also and above all because, the more the years pass, the more its burlesque humor, also openly scat and ultra-sexual, appears on paper in complete contrast to our more polite times where accusations of sexism could easily emerge and create a bad buzz, nipping the film’s theatrical career in the bud.
Fortunately Seth MacFarlane, the man from American Dad! and Ted – who knows his way around transgressive humor – had the good idea to ignore these preconceptions by taking the helm as producer of this reboot and entrusting the role of Drebin to an actor who we had never seen before as a pure comedy hero. Liam Neeson, whose hidden talent he had perceived on this playground during an appearance in his Ted 2.
And the great and good idea of MacFarlane, director Akiva Schaffer (Neighbors of the Third Kind) and his co-writers is not to have sought to forcefully – and therefore artificially – enter the universe of Is There a Cop…? in our time. They took the opposite approach: returning to the sources of the saga. We hear the credits of Police Squad, the ZAZ series at the origin of everything in 1982, we meet Priscilla Presley, the unforgettable Jane Spencer, for a fleeting appearance, we enjoy a scene paying tribute to Nielsen and the original cast) and go deep into the schoolboy humor which is difficult, doped with repetition comedy (here notably linked to the coffee consumption of its hero… All against the backdrop of an investigation obviously absurd led by Drebin’s son (Liam Neeson) after the death of an engineer with as super-villain, the victim’s boss, a tech giant like Elon Musk (Danny Huston) who has developed a diabolical machine capable of returning humans to their barbaric nature.
Is there a cop to save the world? will certainly not enter the Pantheon of the greatest comedies of all time, any more than it will convince people who are reluctant (unfortunately for them) to the humor of ZAZ. But everyone else should enjoy the lively sequence of gags, the quality of the interpretation of Liam Neeson on fire but also the writing of the main female character (the sister of the murdered engineer who will melt Drebin Jr), playing with all the clichés of the sultry blonde to better turn them around.
And it is thanks to her (which Pamela Anderson relishes) that Is There a Cop to Save the World? manages to fit fluidly into its era. That it is not a stupid film or an anti-woke manifesto, claiming that we definitely knew how to laugh better before. Conversely, it demonstrates: that we can always laugh at everything, taking into account the evolution of society and the way women are viewed, for example, without denying or self-censoring ourselves. One more reason to discover this fireworks display of kingly nonsense.
By Akiva Schaffer. With Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser… Duration: 1h25. Released August 13, 2025
