Raunchy And Forgotten 2000’s Crime Comedy Is An R-Rated Naked Gun

By Robert Scucci
| Published 9 seconds ago

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what Naked Gun humor would play like if any of the films were R-Rated, it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Wordplay and visual gags dominate both the dialogue and the background, but there’s a whole lot more cursing and the occasional bare bottom for good measure. If you want to see this kind of humor in practice, your best bet is 2001’s Camouflage, starring none other than the Prince of Puns himself, Leslie Nielsen. Nielsen does what he does best in Camouflage, saying and doing the most off-the-wall things with a completely straight face while operating as an authority figure, even though there are thousands of men better suited for the job.

You’ll recognize all the familiar neo-noir crime comedy beats in Camouflage, which critics always seem to hate. 1993’s Fatal Instinct, one of my favorite films in the subgenre, currently boasts a 14 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Similarly, Camouflage doesn’t even have a critical score, and isn’t faring much better with audiences, sitting at a 17 percent approval rating.

While I’ll be the first to admit that Camouflage doesn’t hold a candle to classics like Airplane! or The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, I’d say it certainly competes with the 2025 Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson-led reboot in the sense that all the mechanics for a great comedy are there. It’s simply more of the same without really offering anything new to the formula.

Still, it’s Leslie Nielsen reliably being Leslie Nielsen, so if you’re a fan of his work in this wheelhouse, you really can’t go wrong with Camouflage.

Drunk On Power, And Pepsi? 

In Camouflage, Marty Mackenzie (Lochlyn Munro) is technically the main character, but his burning desire to become a detective leads him straight to Jack Porter (Leslie Nielsen). Marty is a struggling (read: failed) actor, and when his detective-themed play is killed by critics before it even has a chance at a proper premiere, he decides he needs to play the field in order to improve it. He tracks down Jack Porter, a hard-boiled private eye whose ulcers are so bad that he’s switched to swigging Pepsi from his flask.

The problem is that Jack is on the verge of retirement and has grown cynical because most of his cases involve spying on unfaithful partners and ruining marriages by documenting their infidelity. Marty convinces Jack to let him handle an infidelity case, which leads him to Beaver Ridge, Oregon, where he stumbles across the kind of crime any real detective would want to sink his teeth into: a murder plot.

Basically, Marty is trying to get pictures of an unfaithful partner bumping uglies outside a construction site when he witnesses an explosion meant to take out its owner, Lionel Pond (Tom Aldredge), a seemingly wealthy real estate tycoon who’s secretly on the verge of bankruptcy according to his banker, Horace Tutt, Junior (Patrick Warburton). Complicating matters is Sheriff Alton Owens (William Forsythe), who doesn’t take kindly to the presence of either detective and always seems to show up at active crime scenes during the most incriminating possible times.

The woman closest to the case, Cindy Davies (Vanessa Angel), becomes romantically involved with Marty, and her insight into the investigation sends him on a wild goose chase that raises more questions than answers. Don’t worry, though, because this results in Marty nearly succumbing to cannibalism, but only after destroying Jack’s Chevelle and before destroying his surveillance van.

The Humor Is Reliable, But Not Top Form

Camouflage is disappointing because for every home run of a joke, there are several that swing and miss. Classic bangers like, “Don’t call me a softy. The Viagra fixed that,” are predictable but comfortable, but I was never able to fully understand why Jack Porter insisted on calling everybody a pecker. It’s funny on its own when used in passing once or twice, but he says it often enough to make me think writers Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Epperson, and Karl Schanzer believed they had an epic catchphrase on their hands.

Lochlyn Munro, whose brand of comedy I can only really take in small doses, plays off Nielsen like the two went way back before working together on this film, and the mix of his naivety and Nielsen’s cynicism is what really sells Camouflage. It’s a comedy of errors that’s heavy on slapstick, and some of the best moments happen when something blows up in the background, only for Marty to look completely dumbfounded even though he’s experiencing the exact kind of danger he wanted to experience in the first place.

Camouflage is a lower-brow, R-Rated version of the Naked Gun films that inspired it, and while it’s certainly a diamond in the rough, it’s far from Leslie Nielsen’s finest hour. If you’re a fan of his work and this kind of humor specifically, you’ll have a great time watching it. If you’re hoping it’s going to reinvent the wheel and change how you think about comedy forever, then you don’t know dick about being a dick!

As of this writing, Camouflage is streaming free on Tubi.