Over the last few weeks I watched The Naked Gun series of films. I picked up the DVD set cheap and remembered enjoying them, but there is a clear decline in quality as one goes through the series.
This is not unusual in franchise films, but since comedy depends on quality of laughs to succeed, the falloff feels even more pronounced.
The police/detective genre is ripe with areas for parody, the The Naked Gun series has fun with it, but the longer one goes, the more creative one has to be to keep the gags coming.
Further complicating matters is how the second and third movies make a point of using contemporary politics/pop culture as their subject matter. This doesn't age well.
A lot of the gags fell flat simply because I forgot who these people were and why they were famous and/or controversial. It's like watching Mark Russell re-runs (assuming people even know who he is): it was all based on the news of the moment and much of its impact derived from how highly topical it was. Twenty years later one can only wonder what it was all about.
It's telling that Airplane continues to entertain because many of the touchstones don't feel dated at all. Air travel is still annoying, dramatic conventions haven't changed that much, and sheer absurdity is always in style. In fact, some aspects of it are even funnier because they deal with topics that have subsequently become taboo.
As to the films at hand, the first movie was pretty good, the love scene using "Ebb Tide" is the only reason to watch the second, and the third isn't worth the effort.
Chateau Lloyd 
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