Watching The Naked Gun (2025), Akiva Schaffer’s remake of the 1988 slapstick classic, I got the impression he had been waiting his whole life to make this movie. The screenplay is a rapid‑fire catalog of jokes; ninety brisk minutes of sight gags, wordplay, and pratfalls.
Not every joke lands, but most do, and many had my packed theater roaring. Even the throwaways, like when Detective Frank Drebin responds to “You can’t fight City Hall” with a deadpan “It’s a building, Ed,” easily wrest a chuckle. It was clear from the atmosphere in the theater that audiences have been yearning for a comedy like this, one unabashedly silly and unafraid to revel in it.
Starring Liam Neeson as Police Squad’s Detective Frank Drebin Jr., the film is one of the best-crafted remakes in recent memory. Neeson, long cemented as a stoic action hero in such films as Taken and Schindler’s List, has teased his comedic instincts before, whether in his memorable cameo in Seth MacFarlane’s Ted or a darkly funny skit on Ricky Gervais and Warwick Davis’s series Life’s Too Short. Neeson’s calm, intimidating demeanor, coupled with a natural warmth and geniality, makes him a natural successor to Leslie Nielsen (and the similarity of Liam Neeson’s name to Leslie Nielsen’s strongly suggests a higher power had a hand in all of this; surely Airplane! and the Naked Gun films sit comfortably among God’s DVD collection).
Fittingly, the plot revolves around a device literally labeled “Plot Device,” stolen during the opening’s bank robbery for use by billionaire tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a mad nostalgic who owns a private boys’ club, the Bangel, where, as he proudly tells Drebin, “you can still say retarded.” Cane aims to use the device to plunge the world back into the Stone Age in a bid to eschew modernity.
In keeping with the franchise’s ethos of lampooning the zeitgeist, Schaffer retools Drebin Jr. as a detective fully capable of gratuitous, cartoonish violence, at one point literally ripping an opponent’s arms off and beating him with his limbs (silly, ridiculous, and precisely the point).
The story starts as Drebin arrives at the scene of a mysterious fatal car crash. “Drunk?” his partner asks. “A little,” Drebin replies insouciantly, “just enough to wake me up.” It’s the first glimmer of Cane’s sinister scheme, setting Drebin on the case.
Baywatch star Pamela Anderson co-stars as Beth Davenport, the sister of the crash victim, whose late brother worked for Cane. It’s easy to see how a real-life romance sparked between Anderson and Neeson on set; the pair exude a palpable chemistry on screen and are indubitably having a great time in every scene they share. Their banter brims with such classic Naked Gun wordplay as when Drebin, making introductions, asks her, “UCLA?” “Yes,” she replies, puzzled. “I see LA every day. I live here.”
Of course, no Naked Gun would be complete without the obligatory romance montage. This one, set to Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, runs a little long but delivers a standout gag in which the couple builds a snowman that becomes so jealous of their affection it tries to kill them (you have to wonder how many takes it took before the actors finally stopped laughing).
Although Schaffer grounds the film firmly in the spirit of Nielsen, it is very much a spoof on the modern era. Beyond action‑movie excess, electric cars, smartphones, bodycams, and social media all become fodder for ridicule, affirming that The Naked Gun isn’t stuck in retro homage but gleefully skewers today’s culture. In one of the film’s more pointed gags, Drebin Jr. prays before a portrait of his late father, asking how he can remain original while still faithful to the legacy, only for the camera to pan to Nordberg Jr., shaking his head at a portrait of his late father, O.J. Simpson.
‘28 YEARS LATER’ AND THE PERMANENT APOCALYPSE
If there’s one disappointment to highlight, it’s the decision to push the franchise’s iconic police car opening credits to the end. In a way, though, that choice mirrors both the modern blockbusters The Naked Gun satirizes (nobody bothers with opening title sequences anymore) and the villain’s rant about technology’s ruinous effects (today’s TikTok‑addicted audiences, after all, have no patience for intros, no matter how cleverly crafted).
At a taut ninety minutes, The Naked Gun never overstays its welcome. Spoof comedies have become a rarity in Hollywood, and it’s refreshing to see one this unapologetically silly, absurd, and well‑written. Detective Frank Drebin would call that a hit; he’s still filing the accident report.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.