Living Up to Leslie — The Naked Gun
I admit to having felt a fair degree of trepidation when The Naked Gun was announced. Legacy sequels are, by and large, unnecessary, unwarranted, unwanted, and underwhelming. I understand the nature of the beast that is the entertainment industry’s current business model, where basically nothing can get greenlit if it isn’t associated with a well-known and previously profitable IP, and that cinematic comedies are sadly becoming a dying breed. But at the same time, nostalgia baiting is a double-edged sword. If you’re going to go back to the well that was Police Squad and its trilogy of theatrical masterpieces, you had better do them justice, or longtime fans like myself would be in open revolt. You can make a cop movie spoof pretty much any time you want to, but if you besmirch the good name of Leslie Nielsen, we’re going to have words, and they won’t be kind.
Thankfully, my fears were laid to rest pretty early in this unadulterated shtick fest. While it’s not perfect, this new generation of The Naked Gun, coming out more than 30 years after The Final Insult, is exactly in the spirit of its forebears, with producer Seth MacFarlane and writer/director Akiva Schaffer more than understanding the assignment. The laughs are almost wall-to-wall thanks to an incredibly game cast, with nearly every bit landing perfectly, though there are a few notable exceptions. The tone of the previous films is maintained throughout, balancing the extreme silliness with the film noir aesthetic, while also going one step further by actually making the main crime plot relevant and timely. This is the very rare legacy sequel that truly deserves your attention and your money.
Like the film’s opening sequence, where Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson gleefully playing against type, but also playing it straight as if this really is a hard-nosed police drama) disguises himself as a small child to infiltrate a bank robbery and dole out the harshness, the entire project carries an air of trying to disrupt the system from within. In a fun early gag, Frank Jr. looks wistfully at a picture of his father (and so does the rest of the Police Squad officers) and says that he wants to be just like him… but also different, a meta nod to the realities of Hollywood at the moment. Right from the off Schaffer, MacFarlane, and Neeson are all saying that this flick will live up to its branding, but that it will also succeed on its own merits and have its own sense of fun. That goes a long way to alleviating the concerns of the audience, allowing us to just enjoy the pure slapstick joy that’s about to unfold, from a runner where the cops always somehow have a cup of coffee waiting, to the somewhat clever cameos (Weird Al Yankovic continues his streak of appearing in every entry in this series), to the riotously hilarious jokes in the credits (a lost art and one of my favorite things about shows like Animaniacs when I was a kid).
The story, which wouldn’t even be a consideration in lesser hands, is set in motion by the death of an IT worker named Simon Davenport (Jason MacDonald, one of several UFC-affiliated participants), who drove off the road in his electric car. Fed up with the less “manly” tech and the manner of the victim’s demise, Frank dismissively rules it a suicide, but is compelled to dig deeper when he’s met by Simon’s sister, femme fatale Beth, played by Pamela Anderson. Frank’s inner monologue describing his instant attraction to Beth is some of the best line delivery of Neeson’s career, leaving the entire audience gasping for breath for how hard they were laughing. Beth is convinced Simon was murdered, as he had contacted her the night before his death, worried about something dangerous in his job. This leads Frank to Richard Cane (Danny Huston), the CEO of Edentech, who orchestrated the bank robbery so he could steal a machine from a safe deposit box (it’s literally called the P.L.O.T. Device — sometimes the most obvious jokes really are the best ones). Cane plans to use it to send a subliminal signal to every smartphone in the world, which will reduce mankind to a primal, violent state where only the strongest will survive, resetting the planet to what he feels is its natural, male-dominated state. Cane even sees a kindred spirit in Drebin, as they both express frustration at the “softness” of society.
This is a surprisingly poignant angle to take, given current events. Essentially, the villain is the so-called “manosphere,” and the feckless billionaires who propagate it. They believe their wealth and influence makes them superior to the common man, and they think they should rule by fiat, even when they themselves could not physically endure the conditions they want to set for everyone else, as is magnificently demonstrated in the final act. The motif is enhanced by having Cane’s main henchman played by Kevin Durand, who looks like he could win any Elon Musk lookalike contest just by showing up.
This also makes it a bit curious to center so much of the climax around a mixed martial arts fight, and feature so many people with ties to the UFC such as commentators Michael Bisping and Jon Anik, ring announcer Bruce Buffer, and referee “Big John” McCarthy. UFC President Dana White and main commentator Joe Rogan are huge influences on this toxic subset of the population, and the outfit regularly hosts Donald Trump and his family at their events, which many over the years have criticized as the equivalent of human cockfighting (I wouldn’t go that far, and there was a time when I was a huge fan of the sport, but I have fallen off over the years due to the UFC openly promoting drug addicts, criminals, and accused rapists for the sake of profit and pay-per-view eyeballs). It’s a touch odd to have all these people involved in the film without licensing the UFC’s name and images, instead opting for the semi-parodic “WWFC” — essentially saying the sport is tant amount to pro wrestling for its machismo — because clearly White would never sign off on this playful jab (those who scream “snowflake” at the idea of sensitivity and inclusion are notoriously thin-skinned at any criticism aimed at themselves), yet he didn’t stop his own employees from participating. I’d be interested to learn how all of this was settled.
So the plot unbelievably has resonance, but what about the performances? Neeson and Huston are absolutely spectacular, as is Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr., taking over for the late great George Kennedy. Even Anderson has her moments. She plays a lot of Beth’s character as pure cringe, but unlike The Last Showgirl, she’s actually leaning into it, rather than shamelessly begging for an Oscar. She’s no Priscilla Presley as a Frank Drebin love interest, but she definitely steals a scene or two from Neeson with her timing and delivery. Dare I say, this is the first time I ever truly enjoyed her performance, because this time the fake melodrama is kind of the point. Liza Koshy and CCH Pounder do well in supporting roles at Police Squad, and even Busta Rhymes gets in for a quick gag. Honestly, the only turn I was disappointed in was Moses Jones as “Not Nordberg Jr.” Even then, it’s only because he’s just there for one quick punchline acknowledgement that O.J. Simpson is also dead (the fact that he outlived Norm Macdonald is what I currently cite as proof that there is no just and loving God). I would have loved to see how well they could have played this association up. Oh well, maybe in the next one.
There are a couple of antics that didn’t particularly work for me, and sadly, they’re also the ones that go on the longest. While interrogating Busta Rhymes, Neeson decides to play back his bodycam footage of the bank robbery that proves he was there. What we then get is a series of clips around Frank’s entire day, where he houses several chili dogs and repeatedly farts and shits himself. How is that funny? Like, I get it working once, but clearly you’re fast-forwarding to get to the robbery, so why are we stopping on any shot that isn’t in the bank once we’ve started? It’s not that toilet humor can’t be hilarious (again, see Neeson’s monologue about Beth), but here it just feels like a crutch, as if the Minions took over directing for one scene. Similarly, there’s a fantasy sequence featuring Frank and Beth set to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” The payoff elicits a slight chuckle, but it takes way too long to get there, and I have to automatically deduct points for using a Diane Warren song, especially one that lame. Really, all the catalog tracks in this flick are bad. You don’t really need them in a movie like this, and they only distract from the genuinely hysterical shit happening on screen. I mean, did we really need to set a fight scene to “Fergalicious” just to call back to Frank and Cane somehow “bonding” over their love of the Black Eyed Peas? Technically it’s not even a full BEP song, so what are we doing here? Your mileage may vary, obviously. That’s the subjective nature of humor. Thankfully, these few misfires pale in comparison to the huge guffaws coming from all around the auditorium. There were points where I genuinely worried that I might miss a crucial plot detail because everyone was laughing so loudly over the quieter bits of dialogue.
I miss this. I miss going to the movies and just sitting down to laugh my ass off for 90 minutes of simple silliness. I miss the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker brand of batshit humor. This new Naked Gun didn’t necessarily have to be a Naked Gun movie, but at least with the IP attached, more people are likely to see it than if it had any other identity (and it’s probably worth multiple viewings for all the background and sign gags). And as mentioned, the film does state its intentions from the start that it wants to remind you of what you once loved while also being worthy in its own right.
So few legacy cash-ins do that. Hell, just look at what’s almost certainly going to win the box office this weekend. Freakier Friday manipulated the distribution and embargo of early reviews so it could get “Certified Fresh” status on Rotten Tomatoes without actually achieving the 75% required rating, and critics are pretty united in saying that the movie basically just repeats the previous beats, just with more people swapping, for better or worse. This film, by contrast, takes the framework and timbre of the original trilogy and puts its own spin on it, coming up with new jokes, new angles, and even goes so far as to attempt to have a message. Leslie Nielsen would be proud.
I still say they should have called it Naked Gun 444 1/4 for synergy’s sake, though.
Grade: A-
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Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on August 10, 2025.
