<em>The Naked Gun</em> Is the Film America Needs Right Now

Let’s hear it for the blissfully dumb adult comedy! It feels like it’s been ages since Hollywood was truly excited by the idea of goofing around in the low-brow slapstick sandbox with taxidermy-beaver gags and brilliantly silly “Don’t call me Shirley” puns. And I’d argue that we’ve all lost something in their absence—something that, to me at least, seems as important as oxygen. In a word, that something is fun.

I’m not saying that heading to multiplex is a joyless chore right now. It’s still the best (legal) way to be entertained for a couple hours for less than twenty bucks. But we’re all so busy trying to keep straight what happened in the prequel to the sequel we’re watching, or which stage of the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’re in that going to the theater can feel like homework. Which is why Liam Neeson’s new movie, the blissfully stupid reboot of The Naked Gun, may just be the film that America needs right now. I’m not sure how or why Neeson added deadpan hilarity to his particular set of onscreen skills, but I’m thrilled that he did because it might be the most thrilling takeaway from the 2025 summer movie season.

It wasn’t all that long ago that movie like The Naked Gun came around pretty regularly. Rat-a-tat genre parodies like Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, and the various Austin Powers installments were intricate Rube Goldberg contraptions with the slightest whisp of a plot to cement the barrage of drive-by jokes together. Looking back, I now see that we all took these movies for granted. We just assumed that they’d always be a part of the celluloid ecosystem. This was a glorious era when complete strangers would come together in the hushed darkness of a movie theater with the sole purpose of communing with our fellow man by laughing our asses off like total idiots. The ‘70s gave us the films of Mel Brooks and Monty Python. The ‘80s brought Airplane!, Trading Places, and Fletch. And the ‘90s served up Jim Carrey with a side of the Farrelly brothers. But ever since the early-aughts heyday of Judd Apatow and Ron Burgundy, big dumb comedies—especially ones that clock in under 90 minutes—have been largely MIA. Where did they go? Why did they go? Fortunately, Sgt. Frank Drebin Jr. is on the case.

The hit-to-miss ratio in The Naked Gun reboot is impressively high.

When Leslie Nielsen first brought his Police Squad badge to the big screen in 1988’s The Naked Gun, there was a giddy disconnect between the sight of a white-haired, stentorian-voiced actor who looked your family physician and the frisky cut-up who would literally stoop to anything for a laugh, whether that meant shimmying into a full-body condom before sex or forgetting to take off his microphone before heading to the urinal. Nielsen had come up through the B-movie ranks as a serious, if underutilized, actor. But once he committed grand larceny every second he was on screen in 1980’s Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker masterpiece Airplane!, a new career path opened up for him. He was finally taken seriously…by being profoundly unserious. Ironically, it was the pivot that finally made him a movie star.

Liam Neeson doesn’t need to worry about becoming a movie star. He already is one. But the same disconnect that worked so perfectly for Nielsen works the same sort of magic for the Irishman. Over the long sweep of his career, Neeson has shuffled through countless incarnations—genre heavy, stoic period-piece hero, romantic lead, Oskar Schindler, more period-piece heroism, and finally ubiquitous AARP action avenger who you didn’t want to fuck with. I’m probably not the only one who worried that his most recent onscreen persona as seen in Taken, The Commuter, Non-Stop, etc. would become his final, defining pigeonhole. But the gonzo comedy of The Naked Gun fits him like a bespoke suit. Who knew? Well, anyone who’d witnessed his cheeky, self-deflating cameos on The Simpsons and in Ted 2, that’s who. Even so, the new Naked Gun manages to pack a surprising joy-buzzer thrill.

Co-written and directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer (check out his unsung 2016 gem Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, stat!), the new Naked Gun gleefully leans into its loony idiocy. Neeson plays the son of Nielsen’s Frank Drebin (with a welcome assist from Paul Walter Hauser as the son of George Kennedy’s Ed Hocken). He’s an oblivious detective for the LAPD and he has a knack for barely noticing when all hell breaks loose around him—the clueless eye of a swirling hurricane. The puns are often so bad they’re great and you can see most of the banana-peel mayhem coming from a mile away. But even though there are a ton of jokes that elicit a groan rather than a genuine chuckle, the hit-to-miss ratio is impressively high. It’s a worthy successor. Frank Sr. would be proud.

The new Naked Gun exists solely to let Neeson’s Frank be a complete boob. And that’s not a bad thing.

The plot, such that it is, involves Neeson’s Drebin looking into the seemingly routine death of a brainy engineer in a car accident. Frank suspects foul play. But his blunt-edged lack of self-awareness (not to mention the orgy of destruction he cluelessly leaves in his wake) gets him taken off the case. Neeson makes an eight-course meal out of Frank’s defiance of authority. He’s like Dirty Harry crossed with Wile E. Coyote. So it doesn’t take long for him to go rogue and keep sniffing around after hours. The trail of breadcrumbs leads him to Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a villainous, Muskian tech entrepreneur who employed the car-crash victim. Along the way, he also joins forces (and more, nudge wink) with the victim’s sister, played with vacant, breathy perfection by Pamela Anderson.

Cane’s master plan is to unleash a toxic nerve gas that will turn humanity into a scrum of lawless, primal beasts, leaving civilization to be rebuilt by a star chamber of white, male CEOs. But by now you’ve already guessed (correctly) that none of that matters a bit. The new Naked Gun exists solely to let Neeson’s Frank be a complete boob, break a lot of china, and share his innermost fan theories about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sex and the City. Personally, I would say the movie’s most satisfying highlight was watching the Oscar-nominated star of Schindler’s List deliver the line: “It says here, you got 20 years for man’s laughter…that must have been quite a joke.” As bon mots go, it’s hardly Oscar Wilde. But that doesn’t make its absurdity any less artful.