‘The Naked Gun’ Is A Shot In The Arm For Spoofs

A true return-to-form for the studio comedy, The Naked Gun is a riot of a movie that’s fully loaded with jokes. Thanks to the inspired casting of Liam Neeson and the work of director/Lonely Island alum Akiva Schaffer, it’s a consistently funny affair that leaves you chuckling with its endless stream of sight gags and surrealist comedy.

The film follows Frank Drebin, Jr. (Neeson), the son of the original Naked Gun trilogy’s similarly named investigator at Police Squad as he looks to live up to the legacy of his dad… but also, do something entirely different. When technocrat Richard Cane (Danny Huston) steals the mysterious P.L.O.T. device, it’s up to the young(er) Drebin to handle the case, alongside author Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson).

As the Leslie Nielsen-headed Naked Gun movies parodied police procedurals of the time it was released into, the 2025 legacy sequel pokes all kinds of fun at the modern action movie landscape. Though the phrase “They don’t make ‘em like they used to!” gets thrown around a lot these days, this is a film with a charmingly old-school approach to comedy and spoof, even making fun of its own existence as a legacy sequel.

A huge portion of this is undoubtedly owed to the ingenious casting of Liam Neeson in the role of Frank Drebin, Jr. Though most well-known recently as the go-to tough guy for serious action fare like Taken, Neeson proves here that he has comedic chops to handle a variety of different comedy styles across this movie’s brisk 85 minute runtime.

Whether it’s playing out visual gags, making dryly funny literalist jokes or willingly putting himself in absurdly embarrassing situations for our entertainment, the film wouldn’t work the way it does without his unbelievably committed performance. By utilising our expectations of Neeson’s usual MO, The Naked Gun is able to squeeze plenty of comedy out of its main actor.

The Naked Gun is a genuinely impressive studio comedy

It’s far from the only source of comedy in the film, though – there’s a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ quality to the sheer amount of visual comedy happening on screen at any given time, with gags in the foreground often overshadowing smaller ones in the back. Though there are plenty of great written jokes throughout (some with a real edge!), the sheer volume of literalist sight gags is seriously impressive work by director Schaffer, his co-writers and everyone who worked on the movie.

The rest of the cast are more than game, too. Pamela Anderson plays a very spoofed version of the roles she was type cast in for years, and really brings her A-game to make Beth sincerely believable. You’d never expect Neeson and Anderson to have such remarkable comedic chemistry, but they are genuinely great together.

Danny Huston is also great as villain Richard Cane, an amalgamation of tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk that is easy to hate while still staying hilarious. Paul Walter Hauser as Drebin’s partner Ed Hocken, Jr. (all the Police Squad staff are the children of characters from the original trilogy) is also hilarious, making the most of his limited screentime.

The third act definitely sags a bit, and the style of comedy on display isn’t for everyone. Nonetheless, it doesn’t prevent The Naked Gun from being a sincerely delightful film that serves as a shot in the arm for the spoof genre in general. If you’ve any affection for parody movies of old at all, then seeing this in a full theatre is a total no-brainer.

★★★★