THE NAKED GUN (2025)

Parody films gained traction in the 1960s with James Bond spoofs like Our Man Flint (1966) and Casino Royale (1967), before flourishing in the 1970s with Mel Brooks classics such as Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974). The 1980s then saw the rise of the filmmaking trio Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker (ZAZ), who popularised faster-paced, gag-heavier spoofs with hits like Airplane! (1980) and Top Secret! (1984).

After their short-lived ABC TV series Police Squad! (1982), the ZAZ trio found huge success with its feature-length spin-off The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988. This film cemented Leslie Nielsen’s legacy as a comedic actor known for his deadpan delivery as the bumbling Lt. Frank Drebin, a role he reprised in two sequels.

The genre’s popularity waned in the 2010s following a glut of Scary Movie (2000) sequels, the third and fourth of which David Zucker directed with Leslie Nielsen in a supporting role. The clever and affectionate spoofs of earlier decades had been replaced by dross like Epic Movie (2007), Superhero Movie (2008), and Disaster Movie (2008), which relied on simply re-creating famous scenes and recognisable characters without any insightful wit or homage.

During this fallow period, two highlights were writer-director Jorma Taccone’s MacGruber (2010) and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), the latter of which he co-directed with Akiva Schaffer, the man behind this reboot of The Naked Gun. Seth MacFarlane is also a producer, and has a spoof background himself on animated series Family Guy and American Dad! (the latter even has a ZAZ-like exclamation mark, hmmm), and sci-fi drama The Orville (2017–2022), which poked fun at Star Trek.

The signs are thus promising for the 2025 Naked Gun, as even the casting of Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List) as Frank Drebin Jr. sounds like a wise choice. As Nielsen had discovered with Airplane!, Neeson is likewise able to use his natural gravitas to drive comedy by being amusingly oblivious to any nonsense happening around him. He already appeared in Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), which contained moments of pastiche, and appeared in a beloved scene from the mockumentary Life’s Too Short (2011–13) where he couldn’t improv a comedy sketch without referring to his “full blown AIDS.”

Unfortunately, Naked Gun ’25 is a well-meaning misfire. Comedy is a highly subjective genre, of course, and this film also has the uphill challenge of living up to one of the best comedies of the 1980s, but for me there are a number of ways Schaffer’s reboot missed the mark.

Neeson’s casting works well enough, but considering he’s become a significant face of modern action cinema, post-Taken (2008), it seemed odd not to focus on the gritty genre background he brings to it. Instead, he’s asked to imitate Leslie Nielsen’s dry and amiable approach, for the most part, but Neeson’s too aware of the jokes and can’t help leaning into them, whereas Nielsen’s genius was being more believably aloof.

However, Neeson settles into the role over time, growing visibly more comfortable handling the toilet humour and weirdness by the end. But he’s ultimately a pale imitation of Nielsen, at best, which left me wondering if the film would have been better with a younger comic actor bringing a new approach to it—rather than attempting to repeat the same trick of Nielsen’s casting. Indeed, that’s a direction David Zucker wanted to go with his own unmade Naked Gun 4.

Pamela Anderson plays femme fatale Beth Davenport, ostensibly the Priscilla Presley part from the ’88 movie, and she’s surprisingly fun and makes a good screen partner for Neeson. The film finds an enjoyably rhythm when they’re asked to be a double-act, more so than whenever Frank’s on the job with “sidekick’ Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser). This is Anderson’s second significant screen role of recent years, after The Last Showgirl (2024) proved she’s developed dramatic chops, so if nothing else I’m delighted the former Playboy Playmate is finding good roles on the cusp of turning 60. Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994) starred a pinup “rival” of hers, buxom model Anna Nicole Smith, so it’s amusing to see Anderson join the franchise so late and do a better job.

The storyline is vaguely similar to the original, in that it involves a rich businessman brainwashing people, but it’s far less interesting than having baseball players hypnotised to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II during a televised game. Here, Elon Musk-inspired tech billionaire Richard Crane (Danny Huston) simply wants to give the people of the world a version of the Rage Virus from 28 Days Later (2002), during an MMA cage match for some reason. But who’s going to buy your EVs if you’ve turned everyone into raging lunatics, idiot?

You don’t come to Naked Gun for complex mystery plotting and airtight motivations, but the film could have overcome a few script problems if every minute was packed with hilarious jokes and joyous sequences. Sadly, Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Akiva Schaffer’s screenplay can’t compete with the sheer abundance and quality of gags that buoyed the ’88 movie—which nobody over-35 can help but compare it to. It has its amusements, certainly, but most of the best jokes are in the trailer, so they don’t elicit laughs after you’ve seen them several times to convince you to buy a ticket.

Some of the signature “dad joke” wordplay works nicely (“Can I speak freely? — “I’d prefer English”), but there are so many moments when a humorous idea isn’t fully explored, or you feel opportunities for more laughs pass by. And it’s no fun to watch a comedy and actively be thinking of better ways a scene could have gone.

The funniest skit, involving an infrared camera that makes it look like Frank and Beth are being sexually deviant at home, is genuinely terrific. But it’s also a clear steal from a Carry On Camping (1969) sequence, made more famous when Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (2003) rehashed it, which both achieved the same effect using silhouettes inside a tent. Nevertheless, the basic idea works brilliantly a third time, and they take it to an unexpected extreme that feels perfect for the times. It’s the only comic moment that felt alive to me and had the audience hooked.

Today, everyone has easy access to homemade comedy unrestrained by political correctness on YouTube and TikTok, so The Naked Gun needed to push things in an edgier direction to feel relevant and compete with what’s a hand-grab away. But it mostly felt toothless and afraid to push boundaries or court controversy. It’s surprisingly apolitical too. One standout joke is when Frank effectively admits he’s shot dozens of unarmed black men, which is cleverly constructed and catches you off-guard with the character’s self-implication. But such subtle, edgy moments are few and far between.

It’s only natural to compare and contrast this movie to the original, and I doubt anyone would say Naked Gun ’25 is even its equal. But maybe it would have been wiser to embrace a different tone entirely, as this film mostly follows the setup and vibe of the ZAZ trilogy —which were riffing on 1940s film noir and 1970s cop shows back then. Neeson even gets the same hardboiled detective voiceover, which today feels like an outdated conceit.

The script’s only “modern” ingredient is yet another overplayed Elon-coded villain, complete with self-driving vehicles, and it doesn’t even find time to poke fun at modern films. The closest we get is a joke riffing on a scene from Mission: Impossible —Fallout (2019) involving a fake interrogation room. It would have been great to see more relevant IP being parodied, but perhaps culture’s been so swamped with comic-book movies lately that we’re reduced to targeting outdated things like Microsoft’s “Clippit” assistant, the Black Eyed Peas, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TiVo. They’re all, what, 25-year-old references? I think we can guess the ages of the screenwriters.

I’ve mentioned many moments and jokes that did work for me, but they total maybe 10 minutes of screen time, and The Naked Gun is 85-minutes long. It should have felt light on its feet and brimming with jokes in such a short runtime, but there are too many scenes that just seem to drift by. And comedy relies on timing and pace, in the sense that a run of faintly amusing moments can eventually charm you into laughing more than you might have at something else, once you’ve been won over by the film’s tone and persistence.

Here, the tone’s all over the place, or generally cartoonish. “Magical realism” moments—like Frank tearing a man’s arms off and beating him over the head with them, disguising himself as a schoolgirl to foil a bank robbery, or hand gliding using an owl, or bringing a snowman to life with magic—feel too opposed to the film’s more grounded sensibility elsewhere. If Leslie Nielsen did some of the insane things you see Neeson do here, a certain “spell” would have been broken in how we’re being asked to suspend our disbelief.

Frank Drebin is supposed to exist in a madcap world he’s mostly oblivious to, famously breezing past moments of utter nonsense with a subject-changing “well…” Most of the jokes I dislike in the original Naked Gun films involved this fine line being crossed, as even ZAZ made mistakes and sometimes took things too far.

However, as mentioned, comedy is a highly subjective genre. Everyone’s funny bones are unique. I’ve spoken to people who found Naked Gun ’25 hilarious from start to finish, so it’s impossible to critique its quality in their eyes. They laughed, so it worked. We all have different tolerances for comedic things, or a specific taste when it comes to how spoofs should be done. But as a lifelong fan of films like Airplane! and Hot Shots! (1991), who’s always held the Naked Gun trilogy in particularly high regard (the first is one of my favourite comedies), it feels like talented folk came together and made a Naked Gun fan-film with funny moments but an overall lack of magic.

USA | 2025 | 85 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Akiva Schaffer.
writers: Dan Gregor, Doug Mand & Akiva Schaffer (based on ‘Police Squad!’ by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams & Jerry Zucker).
starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston & CCH Pounder.