Detective Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and new acquaintance Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) take on evil billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston) — and his mysterious P.L.O.T. device.
1988’s The Naked Gun (and to a lesser extent its confusingly-numbered sequels, 2 1/2 and 33 1/3), from the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, are rightly revered as parody classics. They are also, it has to be said, relics of a bygone era: when comedy films still ruled the roost, when spoof was a genre in rude health, when it hadn’t been weakened by years of cheap knock-offs and straight-to-streaming slop. Comedy, the received wisdom goes, does not belong in a cinema anymore.
Perhaps conscious of this pressure, The Naked Gun, 2025 edition, opens a little hesitantly, with an action scene introducing Detective Frank Drebin Jr (Liam Neeson), son of the original Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), disguised as a schoolgirl. The sequence doffs a cap to the original 1988 film’s effortlessly enjoyable pre-titles fight, without quite matching its fluidity or funnies. But the good thing about a film like this is, if you’re not vibing with one joke, you don’t have to wait long for another one to come along. The comedy density here is thicker than a well-stuffed beaver.
Liam Neeson is superb at wink-free deadpan comedy.
The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer is on co-writing and directing duties for this ‘requel’, and he’s the perfect choice: a proven master of parody and long-time comedy cognoscente who captures the hallmarks of the series handsomely. There is the delightfully over-literal wordplay (“UCLA?” “I see LA every day, I live here”). There’s the old detective trope of a character describing a beautiful woman in narration, taken to its ludicrous logical conclusion here. There are oodles of visual gags, background nonsense happening while perfunctory dialogue plays in the foreground. There are just straight nosedives into the valleys of the surreal (look out for a particularly bizarre sequence involving a snowman). There’s the obligatory Weird Al cameo. There’s even Nielsen himself, given a fittingly ridiculous tribute via a framed photo — and in the reincarnation of an owl.
But Schaffer isn’t afraid to shake things up. The smoky jazz soundtrack is still here, but what was once a straight TV cop-show spoof now also nods to the likes of Mission: Impossible and The Dark Knight. It also acknowledges that police no longer hold wide public esteem. (“Since when do cops have to follow the law?” asks an incredulous Drebin at one point.) And Neeson’s Drebin Jr is a tougher cookie: harder-nosed and with more gravelly gravitas than Nielsen’s old-fashioned take — albeit one obsessed with Buffy and the Black Eyed Peas.
As demonstrated in Life’s Too Short (“I’m always making lists!”), Neeson is superb at wink-free deadpan comedy and leads from the front, the entire ensemble matching him. They are all cannily cast too, each lead essentially doing a piss-take of their more dramatic roles, from Neeson’s grizzled cops to Pamela Anderson’s sultry sexpots to Danny Huston’s scowling baddies to CCH Pounder’s desk-slamming police chiefs. The result is a film that has a better chance of producing a belly laugh than any in recent memory: one that deserves, as Drebin would say, “20 years for man’s laughter”.
Watching this affectionately silly reboot-sequel is like swimming in raw sewage. Which is to say, you’ll love it.
