Leslie Nielsen is truly the grandmaster of slapstick comedies. In the new film "Wrongfully Accused," Nielsen once more proves that he is capable of saving a bad spoof from being bad. In it, he releases his natural talent of comic genius into his character similar to the one from the magnificent movie "The Fugitive"(Harrison Ford) and, of course, makes us laugh up a storm.
Leslie Nielsen is surprisingly energetic in this film, more than usual. I mean, it's not like him to do some of the things he does in this production. Then again, this is not your typical Nielsen movie in any means. The plot is awfully serious for a slapstick and the characters are too complicated. In a drama movie these things are all signs of skill, but for a movie that just wants to have fun, these things are flaws. Nielsen saves the production by doing what he can with the script.
Another problem of the film is that it virtually strained for laughs, to the point of making the audience think before they laugh. For example, the accused murder walks into a town labeled "The Town That Has More Police Than Anywhere in the Whole Wide World."
There are some quickie jokes that do work, for instance: In a hospital, the intercom speaker says "Dr. Kavorkian to Mr. Simson's room." Or how about when Ryan looks over Lake's photo album under the family tree, the father has two branches, her dad and Bill Clinton. The funniest: When Harrison makes the jump from the dam, from "Fugitive" you here the title song from "Baywatch" and see a group of attractive young lifeguards race to site. The US marshals shoot machine guns at the criminals' feet making them do an Irish dance.
"Wrongfully Accused" is the summer's second spoof movie. First along came the lame "Mafia," which didn't work because there were no main characters. To have Leslie Nielsen on your team when you're making a spoof, that's an almost certain success even if the film on its own is bad, like this movie. In other words, if this movie was absent of him and was still released in theaters it should have been called "Wrongfully Released."
