‘The Naked Gun’ Movie Review: The Art Of The Spoof Returns With Smartly Stupid, Gag-A-Minute Reboot
Photo from Paramount Pictures
From Jeremy Kibler
Comedy may be subjective, but after Airplane!, David Zucker’s 1988 detective spoof The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!—as well as sequels The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult—is objectively one of the most side-splitting comedies ever. These spoofs proved that the filmmakers behind them had to be really smart to be this stupid, and it certainly didn’t hurt that Leslie Nielsen was such an expert deadpan comedian as Lt. Frank Drebin. A sequel/reboot with the same exact title (as the trend goes), 2025’s The Naked Gun is so gloriously, unabashedly goofy and ridiculously funny that it makes one hope the Comedy Spoof will no longer be a dying breed.
Liam Neeson would seem like unlikely casting as Frank Drebin, Jr., but then again, Leslie Nielsen started as a serious dramatic actor, too. Also, Liam Neeson and Leslie Nielsen, get it? The apple hasn’t fallen far from the doltish tree, and as part of the joke, Sergeant Frank Drebin, Jr. is “the new version.” When we first meet Sergeant Frank Drebin Jr., he’s disguised as a pint-sized Girl Scout skipping around with a lollipop, and no, the unmasking and upsizing effect is not supposed to be realistic for a second. After foiling a bank robbery with his brash, violent methods, Frank and his partner, Ed Hocken, Jr. (Paul Walter Houser, a great stand-in for George Kennedy), are chewed out by their beyond-pissed superior (CCH Pounder) and reassigned to investigate a car crash in Malibu. It looks like a possible suicide, but this leads to Frank falling for Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), the dead body’s sister and a sultry author of “books about true crimes based on stories she makes up,” and uncovering a nefarious plan by an electric vehicle billionaire (Danny Huston) who had employed the dead body.
Director Akiva Schaffer (member of the Lonely Island troupe) shoots his shot, making himself a natural modern-day successor to the ZAZ gang (Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker). Credit this to the script co-written by Schaffer, Dan Gregor & Doug Mand: this fourth installment is never just a nostalgia checklist that feels glued to the past (and if you want the past, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by the nice beaver that Priscilla Presley had stuffed 37 years ago). There’s structure with the investigation plot, which comes with a world-dominating device literally called P.L.O.T. Device, but it’s so breathlessly rushed as if not to actually matter. The real reason we’re here is for the rapid-fire barrage of jokes, wordplay, sight gags, and overall silliness, and these guys keep it clever and loaded.
A running gag involving coffee cups never gets old, as well as cute background sight gags at the police station (i.e. the entrance of the cold-case room is adorned with the curtain flaps of a meat locker). A raunchy silhouette gag, à la the Austin Powers movies, is hilarious in spite of all of us all having classy taste. A bathroom-break understudy cameo is inspired. One absurd non-sequitur, a romantic ski-weekend montage all set to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” takes such a wonderfully dark, weird, and go-for-broke turn out of Jack Frost (both versions). As editing can often be what makes the jokes in a comedy work as well as they do, there’s a sly O.J. Simpson-as-Nordberg joke and even a Bill Cosby jab that’s as quick and pointed as the baked-in commentary of law enforcement today. Even a diarrhea-caught-on-bodycam joke goes fast enough as to not revel in the gross-outs.
If Neeson needed another career recharge after the post-Taken string of so many barely distinguishable action movies, this is a showcase for a new particular set of skills (briefly glimpsed in Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West). He rarely gets to be funny, and Neeson is having a daffy blast, mixing it up but still playing it straight with that gravelly voice perfect for a hard-boiled voice-over.
As Neeson’s romantic foil, a winningly warm Pamela Anderson is very game as a femme fatale and not afraid to look silly, especially when performing a jazzy ditty on stage at a club as a diversion. As is the recipe for playing broad comedy, Neeson and Anderson just commit and never let on that they’re in a comedy.
It’s a whole other conversation, but Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s desperate attempts at parodies of popular movies threatened the entire art of lampoonery with extinction. They just don’t make broad spoofs anymore, not like this. Does every single joke score? Maybe not, but the hit rate is still high, and it feels so damn good to laugh so often. This 2025 edition of The Naked Gun isn’t quite as nonstop and wall-to-wall with the jokes as those first three Leslie Nielsen-starring films, but funny is funny. This is still a knowingly stupid delight.
Rating: 3.5/5
The Naked Gun is currently in theaters.
