The Naked Gun Hits the Target

Recent events have made me, like many Americans in 2025, really desperate for a laugh. Naturally, I regarded the new Naked Gun as a potential laugh-bonanza and went to see it immediately.

And I laughed quite a few times, so it was a win. But I was aware all the while that this is pretty mediocre stuff in the realm of all-out, completely silly, utterly shameless and low-down comedy. The new Naked Gun lacks that ruthlessness of the 1988 original — one-liners, puns, parodic references, wall-to-wall sight gags, insane slapstick acrobatics, the whole shmear proudly on display.

But if you like comedy, it’s impossible not to be struck by the ingenious casting in the Naked Gun reboot. No less than Liam Neeson plays the son of bumbling police detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin of the Los Angeles Police Squad, but as a chip-off-the-old-block behaving just like Drebin Sr. That’s the role that finally made minor actor Leslie Nielsen a big star at age sixty-two. How could Neeson possibly compete with the memory of Nielsen’s ridiculous gifts — his earnest, square, deadpan look, and that obtuse, dunderheaded acting style that flourished in the 1950s when the ideal movie man was a big arrogant dope in a suit. Nielsen’s sly, camp spin on all those qualities made him a standout even in that other great Jim Abrahams-Zucker brothers comedy triumph, Airplane! (1980),which put him in competition with his other 1950s has-been peers such as Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves.

Legend has it that when Peter Graves read the script for Airplane!, he was so clueless that he had to ask Robert Stack what the big joke was supposed to be. “We’re the joke,” Stack explained.

In 2025, however, we have Liam Neeson — a large, melancholy, craggy-faced, stage-trained Irish actor who had already succeeded in remaking his career once when he became a middle-aged action star in Taken (2008) after decades of serious, dramatic roles. To make another unlikely leap into wacky comedy as a senior citizen would be truly epic.

Well — he doesn’t quite make it. Neeson’s evaluation of his own performance, based on vast acting experience over many decades, is dead-on: “I was okay.” But it turns out everyone’s desperate for a laugh these days, so the movie’s doing fine at the box office so far.

Neeson’s certainly amusing in The Naked Gun, though he might’ve been funnier in a better-directed film. In certain scenes, he seems to be struggling a bit to get his lines out intelligibly, no doubt distracted by having to suppress his Irish accent while saying wildly absurd shit. Costar Pamela Anderson, a charming person but not a very accomplished actor, is also sometimes struggling to get her lines out smoothly. And director Akiva Schaffer (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) needs to have it explained to him that when both lead actors are barely pronouncing their dialogue correctly, you need to do a second take.

Most people are too young or too deprived of comedy movies to even remember how killingly funny the first Naked Gun was way back in 1988. I thought I might be exaggerating its hilarity in my own memory, so I went back to watch it again. It’s funnier than I remembered. I was dying all over again.

You’re just not going to beat director David Zucker at this laugh-getting game. Or the legendary writing team of brothers David and Jerry Zucker with the late Jim Abrahams, the team responsible for Airplane! (1980) and Top Secret! (1984) as well as the original Naked Gun franchise. They build laughs on top of more laughs on top of yet more laughs, aiming at an escalating effect toward total viewer hysteria. But here, with the reboot, Schaffer is a slack director, apparently working with a slack screenwriter (also Schaffer, with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand), a slack editor (Brian Scott Olds), and a slack producer (Seth MacFarlane) — all of which adds up to a lot of dead air. Sometimes scenes will actually end on an unintelligible line or limp joke that fails to land, lingering there pointlessly for several seconds so the audience can drink in how much it didn’t work. There are plenty of these laugh-free zones throughout the film.

Meanwhile, here’s a typical sequence in Zucker’s 1988 Naked Gun. It’s parodying spy-mastermind movie plots, especially Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which an assassination plan involves shooting a diplomat at a concert at the swanky Albert Hall during the performance of a symphony, when the cymbals crashing at a particular point in the score will cover the sound of the gunshot.

The Zucker-Abrahams version of such an elaborate assassination plan takes place at an Angels baseball game, where the evil scheme is to kill visiting monarch Queen Elizabeth II “during the seventh inning stretch.” Drebin has foiled the assassination and, confronting the villain, Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban), shoots him.

“You killed him!” exclaims a distressed bystander.

Drebin reassures the woman that he’s merely used a knock-out bullet, so the stunned Ludwig will be fine in a minute. However, just then the dazed Ludwig staggers back and does a pratfall-flip over the stadium railing, falling several stories to his death.

Awkward.

“Well…” says Drebin lamely to the woman.

Drebin goes to the railing to look down and see if Ludwig might be saved. His friend and colleague Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) joins him.

Ludwig looks pretty dead, but maybe there’s still a chance…? 

A bus runs over him. Ooh, that’s not good.

Then a steamroller passes slowly over the body, flattening it like a pancake.

And to cap it off, a New Orleans–style marching band tromps over the corpse while playing a spirited version of “Louie, Louie.”

You think it’s impossible to top that, but wait — Captain Ed Hocken, overcome at witnessing such a horribly protracted death, collapses weeping on Frank Drebin’s shoulder.

“My dad died the same way,” he sobs.

The Naked Gun reboot summons up a bit of this comic relentlessness here and there. There’s a running gag involving Frank Drebin Jr., always on the case with his partner Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), self-importantly unable to stop for wimpy concerns like beverages, instead getting handed cups of coffee by underlings everywhere they go. Small but still half-full Styrofoam cups of coffee get hurled aside so they can grasp enormous cups of coffee held out by servile hands. As Drebin is speeding down some urban street, obliviously striking a pedestrian who goes flying over the roof of the car, a cup of coffee is magically handed in through the window and accepted with the usual brusque thanks.

Still, as delightful as that kind of thing is, it must be noted that Paul Walter Hauser, an excellent comic talent, is given almost nothing to do here. It’s straight lines and routine police business practically the whole way. Again, compare that to the many golden comic lines and bits given to George Kennedy as Hocken Sr. in the original Naked Gun. Kennedy was a great actor, though his big hulking frame and homely mug usually confined him to playing one of “the heavies” in movies like Charade, The Dirty Dozen, and Cool Hand Luke.

But, like Nielsen, Kennedy had a superb deadpan delivery. He’s introduced in the first Naked Gun when he picks up Frank Drebin at the airport. Drebin’s just back from his vacation in Beirut, where he tried in vain to find the healing peace and quiet one naturally goes to Beirut for. He’s still struggling to get over a bad breakup with his longtime girlfriend Victoria. As the two men get into the car, Hocken — sympathetic, but too macho to break it gently — tells Drebin the bad news that Victoria’s gotten married.

Drebins asks: “What do you know about him?”

“Not much,” Hocken replies. “Just that he’s an Olympic gymnast, and it’s the best sex she’s ever had.”

Pamela Anderson plays a variation on the old Priscilla Presley role, which mostly involves being absurdly good-looking, remaining coolly composed in the midst of every kind of comically sexist nonsense imaginable, and exuding possible femme fatale vibes until she falls hopelessly in love with the addled Drebin. In the first Naked Gun, Presley’s Jane Spencer character begins her flirtation with Drebin when she climbs up a ladder to get something, displaying her legs to Drebin, who’s standing underneath her looking up admiringly. “Nice beaver!” he exclaims.

She then climbs down carrying a large, taxidermied beaver statuette and hands it to Drebin.

Presley was surprisingly deft at fitting into this circus, and Anderson as Beth Davenport isn’t too bad either, as long as her dialogue isn’t too tricky or extensive. Trying to crack her brother’s case, she goes to a nightclub with known villain Richard Cane played by Danny Huston. Having agreed to distract Cane so Drebin can search his club, Beth Davenport ad-libs something about how much she loves jazz. Huston isn’t terrific in the villain role — Ricardo Montalban was infinitely funnier — but on the other hand, he isn’t given a lot of comic material to work with. Cane merely agrees that he, too, is a jazz enthusiast. This means that, inevitably, Beth Davenport has to disguise Frank Drebin’s disastrously noisy search process by rushing up on stage, seizing the microphone, and scatting wildly and badly — shoo-be-doo-be-bop-wah-wah, etc. — while the dazed musicians try to cope with her awful stylings. Here, Anderson really throws herself into it.

The new Naked Gun has gotten a big boost from the on-set romance that apparently broke out between Neeson and Anderson and has continued through the press junket. It’s as if we didn’t realize how fond we were of both Neeson and Anderson, separately, until they got together. Everybody’s charmed by this when-worlds-collide coupling which seems to emphasize their differences — she was in Baywatch, he was in Schindler’s List.

But for all Neeson’s high culture cred, the two performers are oddly alike in the way they’ve both persevered over several decades in the limelight. Anderson, for example, has shaken off the tawdriness and exploited-victim image of her early fame and revealed herself to be a heartwarming political leftist, an intelligent movie fan with an impressive set of picks on the Criterion Collection site, and a pioneer among famous women in forswearing makeup in her public appearances, arriving on red carpets fresh-faced and elegantly dressed.

And a Naked Gun reboot is the perfect vehicle to exponentially increase our affection for Anderson and Neeson. Their willingness to try to make us laugh in these dire times, even if it doesn’t always come off, suddenly makes them huge favorites of ours.