THE NAKED GUN
Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Spoof movies in the vein of The Naked Gun had their heyday long, long ago—it started with Airplane! in 1980, and lasted perhaps through Hot Shots! in 1991. In the middle of that period, we got The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen, who had already surprised audiences by pivoting from a long career in serious dramas before pivoting to his part in Airplane! Nielsen then became, for all intents and purposes, the poster boy for spoof movies, starring in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear in 1991, then The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994. Those diminishing returns continued with little-known films such as Dracula: Dead and Loving It in 1995; the Fugitive spoof Wrongfully Accused in 1998; and his injection into the Scary Movie franchise in 2003 (Scary Movie 3) and 2006 (Scary Movie 4).
By the 2000s, the Scary Movie franchise represented a genre long run out of steam, made by people who have exhausted all the good punch lines, and who clearly no longer quite understood the assignment. Scary Movie (2000) was the cinematic equivalent of a hat on a hat, created in response to Scream (1996) and its sequels—but those films were packed with self-referential comedy, a meta exercise that did not lend itself well to parody, because parodying something already comedic makes little sense.
Enter 2025, well into the era of the rooboot and the “legasequel,” and this new The Naked Gun qualifies as both. I would have preferred a well-made film in this genre that was an original idea, but The Naked Gun is what we’ve got. And here’s the surprise: this is perhaps the first spoof movie made in thirty years by people who not only understood the assignment, but have sharp, comedic minds.
I have often wondered what it would be like to remake Airplane!—full disclosure, my all-time favorite comedy—in the modern era. The pop culture references would have to be updated, as would any of the gags related to technology. Would it play quite as well? Probably not, but I would be very interested in seeing it attempted. I’ve gotten the next-best thing with The Naked Gun in 2025, which succeeds shockingly well at updating all the references and the technology, while fully honoring the tone of the humor in the original.
Plus, this Naked Gun has something other reboots almost never have, which is restraint—not in terms of all the deliberately dumb humor, which is the overall point of this exercise, but in any penchant for self-reference, or particularly reference to the original 1998 film. Aside from the plot connection that establishes this as technically a sequel rather than a reboot (Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Jr, son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lieutenant Frank Drebin; Paul Walter Hauser plays Ed Hocken Jr, son of George Kennedy’s Captain Ed Hocken), there’s only a couple of references to the first film, so subtle that only audiences who well remember the original will catch them, just as the passing shot of a stuffed beaver, or the very brief cameo by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which also happened in the original. There’s even a very brief cutaway to Priscilla Presley watching the news. And yet, anyone who has never seen any of the previous films can watch and enjoy without feeling like they’re missing anything—these are just fun little Easter Eggs for those of us who do remember.
A big part of what makes The Naked Gun work is its inspired casting, once again with people known as serious actors, who play their parts straight. Liam Neeson, already enjoying a reinvention over the past 15 years as an older action star, could not be more perfect as Drebin Jr. He shot this movie at the age of 72, and although that’s 10 years older than Nielsen was in the original Naked Gun, they still have the long career of serious roles in common. And Nielsen was indeed born 26 years before Neeson, which certainly makes them believable as father and son. Paul Walter Hauser has proven to be a versatile actor across genres, and I liked him better here than I did as the Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, also currently in theaters. As Drebin’s love interest, Beth Davenport, we get Pamela Anderson, a worthy successor to Priscilla Presley in this genre.
With the addition of Danny Huston as the Elon Musk-like villain, Richard Crane, who sells electric cars but also plans to detonate a device with sound waves that makes everyone kill each other so he can inherit and rule over the world with fellow billionaires after waiting out the carnage in a bunker, The Naked Gun features a game cast of actors who all understand what kind of movie they’re in. None of it feels like a cash-grab, and the script, by Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Akiva Schaffer (who also directed), manages to make the humor feel fresh rather than rehashed.
I won’t pretend that all the gags land, but with this type of humor, mileage varying comes with the territory. The run time is a wonderfully brisk 85 minutes—exactly the same as the original film—which keeps the pacing breakneck, creating a far better feeling than the countless “comedies” of the past twenty years that bafflingly clock in at over two hours, creating opportunities for lulls. There are no lulls in The Naked Gun, and if one gag doesn’t make you laugh, there will be another one that will, and in a matter of seconds. That is precisely how these movies are supposed to work.
This may not be an original idea, but police procedurals as a target of parody is an evergreen proposition, and at least The Naked Gun is a recognizable property. Well, it is for us older folks, anyway—but I already noted that this movie can work just as well for anyone who has never seen the previous films in the franchise, or indeed are unaware that they even exist. Funny is funny, and as long as you’re open to this kind of humor (dumb jokes written by smart people), the bottom line is that this movie is funny. And things look surprisingly promising for this film: a score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes; a score of 75 on MetaCritic; a surprisingly large crowd in the theater where I went to see it, at 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday. It’s tracking to make around $20 million this weekend, exceeding initial projections.
Whether The Naked Gun will prove to be rewatchable the way its predecessor was remains to be seen; I may see it again just to look for visual gags I missed the first time around. Movies like this tend to pack in a lot, which means some of it can get missed while you’re laughing. This is the best problem a comedy can have, and god knows movie comedies that actually get a theatrical release are a dying breed. It’s fantastic to see a movie like this come along with so much more life in it than anyone had any reason to expect.
There’s so much more to offer here than you’d think!
Overall: B+