The Naked Gun is stupid. I say this with all my heart and in every sense of the word: The 2025 update of the classic police-movie spoofs starring Leslie Nielsen is idiotic, asinine, and downright preposterous. And its parade of slapstick, sight gags, and deadpan wordplay had me grinning ear to ear. This is a movie that subjects the Oscar-nominated star of Schindler’s List to a battery of humiliations that include, but are not limited to, extended scenes of intestinal distress, visual sexual innuendo, and interactions with multiple, intentionally janky-looking puppets. I liked all 85 minutes of it, and I can’t wait to see it again just to pick up any of the punchlines I laughed over or funny little signs I overlooked.
Stupid was the name of the game when Nielsen played boneheaded cop Frank Drebin in six episodes of the brilliant-yet-canceled Police Squad! and its three big-screen spin-offs. And it remains so with Liam Neeson in the role of boneheaded cop Frank Drebin Jr. The fearless foolishness of the new Naked Gun begins with casting Neeson because his name kinda sorta sounds like Nielsen’s, and doesn’t let up until the last fake, pun-laden credit rolls. But as proven by every sweaty genre parody that popped up in Scary Movie’s wake, it takes genuine wit, talent, and inspiration to make a good movie out of something this dumb. Frank Jr. may be standing on the just-out-of-frame shoulders of spoof giants David Zucker, his brother Jerry, and their longtime collaborator Jim Abrahams, but he’s been hoisted up there by a guy who knows a good idea (hear him out, hear him out) when he sees one: The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer.
Schaffer’s primary upgrade to The Naked Gun formula is an added visual panache; as opposed to the flat, overlit, TV-like compositions preferred by Abrahams and the Zuckers, his camera swirls and swoops around Frank Jr., his Police Squad comrade Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) and femme fatale/true-crime author Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson). Taking the filmmaking so seriously only serves to underline the glorious absurdities unfolding within the frame: At one point, Neeson is locked in a frenetic punch-up that wouldn’t look out of place in a Taken sequel (or Taken knockoff) – until he pulls his adversary’s arms off and starts swinging them like flesh-and-bone nunchuks.
The gravitas that carried Neeson through both the “acclaimed star of prestigious period pictures” and “aging action-movie badass” phases of his career is trickier to wield. He’s fully committed to playing Frank’s obliviousness and delusions of heroism, never giving way to the shameless, cross-eyed mugging Nielsen was frequently guilty of. He expertly modulates into a higher register to, say, rant about DVR etiquette or wince through a chili-dog-induced bathroom emergency – but when he’s in beatdown mode, the goofus-turned-gallant contrast isn’t quite there. It’s almost like we need a gag as outrageous as the detachable arms (or the stream of bad guys queuing up behind a “take a number” stanchion that follows it) to remind us that this is, indeed, a comedy. Not exactly what you want from a franchise renowned for playing its funny business with the straightest face possible.
Fortunately, the vintage ZAZ spirit translates more cleanly in other areas. This thing is absolutely packed with jokes, not all of which call attention to themselves – several phony corporate logos and silly slogans linger in the foreground and background. (My favorite: The Crypto.com Arena-riffing name of the setting for a climactic MMA bout.) Frank is constantly being handed coffee cups from offscreen, with Schaffer and the props department making a meal of the cups’ size, where they’re deposited, and how they’re delivered. If a certain timeliness appears to be creeping into the humor via Danny Huston’s tech-mogul villain Richard Cane and the way his evil scheme subtly razzes the Hollywood reboot fever that made this Naked Gun possible, just remember that the second movie in the franchise pinned some of its laughs to the not-so-evergreen foibles of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Walter Mondale. More worrisome are references to the 2004 Super Bowl and the lineup of the Black Eyed Peas that, for all their non sequitur specificity, feel like they’re left over from drafts of earlier, circa 2010s attempts to bring Drebin out of cold storage.
Still, it’s hard to get too mad about a movie whose big, apocalyptic plot hinges on a gizmo identified onscreen as the P.L.O.T. Device. The Naked Gun’s hit-to-miss ratio is highly weighted toward the hits – and there’s a great variety to them, too. The “Cigarette?” “Yes, it is”-style setups pile up quickly (If I may shout out another favorite: “You can’t fight city hall.” “No, it’s a building.”), but they’re balanced with a couple of segments where Schaffer lets his freak flag fly at length. And while Hauser is largely stuck playing straight man to Frank’s nonsense – keeping him from the sort of lunacy that allowed his Mole Man to steal swaths of First Steps out from under the Fantastic Four – Anderson gets a couple of spotlight moments to go hilariously H.A.M. The path to her full-fledged, post-The Last Showgirl comeback runs through some on-point comedic scatting here.
For these and other reasons (I haven’t even gotten to the fun the script has with Frank’s hard-boiled voiceover narration) it’s tempting to overrate The Naked Gun for merely existing, for being itself – or, to paraphrase the musician who’s now appeared in all four Naked Guns, daring to be stupid. There’s nothing truly new about a new release that’s built on the bones of a comedy that came out in 1988 – but the general lack of major-studio comedies of this caliber in theaters in 2025 deepens the impression The Naked Gun leaves. It, like its predecessors and previous Schaffer efforts like Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, will thrive in living rooms and on laptops, where you’ll be able to pause and screenshot every last joke. But I can’t overstate how good it felt to laugh at those jokes in a dark room full of friends and strangers, where Liam Neeson’s naked butt (or that of a body double) was spread wide across a giant screen.
It’s a sad comment on the current state of movies, but there actually is some novelty to that experience. The new Naked Gun may not be a groundbreaking comedy classic, but in its own, silly way, it does feel important. It shows that something that’s this much of a lark can still be made with craft and care and maximum entertainment value. I hope we get to see more Naked Guns, and more movies like them. I hope they’re not sentenced to streaming purgatory. Because to stop making broad, unabashed comedies of this stripe, or to keep them from coming to a theater near you? Now that’d be really stupid.
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