by Len Weiler
In case you were wondering whatever happened to the zany, madcap laugh-a-minute, comedies made popular in the 1980s by movies like
Airplane! (1980), you need wonder no more. They are back – or perhaps I should say one of them is back. I am referring, of course, to the reboot of the original police spoof
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! which appeared in 1988 and spawned two sequels:
The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994). All of these grew out of a short-lived TV series simply called
Police Squad! (beloved in retrospect), which ran for just 6 episodes back in 1982.
The new model is simply called The Naked Gun (no exclamation point). It stars – remarkably – Liam Neeson as clueless, deadpan Detective Frank Drebin, Jr. And to answer the most important question - yes, it is funny, very funny. Is it as funny as the original 1988 movie? We’ll come back to that. First, a short history.
Airplane!, written and directed by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker (soon known simply as ZAZ) was a spoof of the many disaster movies popular in the 1970’s, specifically Airport (1970) [bomber on a plane, blizzard at the airport] and its three sequels (which shall go unnamed here), as well as popular disaster dramas like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) [passengers and crew trapped in overturned luxury liner] and The Towering Inferno (1974) [fire in the world’s newest, tallest skyscraper]. Airplane! was an absolute hoot – relying on verbal and visual puns, sight gags, slapstick, caricature, and straight-faced cluelessness – all delivered in a slick, rapid-fire style not seen since the best Marx Brothers films of the 1930s .
The 1988
Naked Gun, another ZAZ venture, applied a similar approach to the police action genre, with similar success. Like
Airplane!, it is considered one of funniest films of all time – for example, #13 in
TimeOut’s 2025 list of the
100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time (with
Airplane! sitting at #2).
TimeOut’s Tom Huddleston writes, “
Second only to Airplane! in the gag-for-gag hit-rate stakes, The Naked Gun never met a dumb pun, slapstick pratfall or deadpan one-liner it didn’t like.”
Although it feels like it, this new The Naked Gun is not a ZAZ production. Rather it’s written by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, and directed Akiva Schaffer - all of whom have backgrounds mostly in TV comedies, although they worked together on the feature-length animation reboot Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022). The Naked Gun, however, flies at a whole different altitude.
Liam Neeson, an actor known for dramatic roles - from his Oscar nominated lead performance in
Schindler’s List (1993), to
Michael Collins (1997),
Kinsey (2004),
Taken (2008), and
Widows (2018) - is not known for comedy and certainly not for silly. The same was true however for Leslie Nielson, who, before his supporting role in
Airplane! and his leading role as detective Frank Drebin in the original
Naked Gun, worked exclusively in dramatic roles, from westerns to war stories, even for a time as the romantic lead in love stories. Neeson, playing against type as Frank Drebin, Jr. in
The Naked Gun, turns out to be great at it. He does not smile. He delivers even the most nonsensical lines completely deadpan with a gruff growl of a tough-guy voice. He does not mug (unlike Nielson’s version of the character). Drebin, Jr. is totally committed to police work - albeit with a total disregard for any restrictive rules. Which gets him into trouble. Which he also disregards. Yet, amid the comic chaos, over the course of this 85-minute mini-masterpiece, Neeson is such a good actor that he brings to what could have been a purely cardboard caricature a bit of humanity. A
little bit, but still.
Commenting on the 1988 Gun, Roger Ebert noted that “reviewing The Naked Gun is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield – you can get the words, but not the music.” [The comedian Rodney “I don’t get no respect” Dangerfield” was known for his rapid-fire stream of one-liners, like “I was ugly, very ugly. When I was born the doctor smacked my mother!”]. So, rather than use mere words and to give you some sense of the comic sensibility if not the “music” of the new Naked Gun, here’s a link to the movie’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adb299p3B98
Sure, there are some bad jokes in the mix, but even groaners become funny. As Ebert also commented, “you laugh, and then you laugh at yourself for laughing”!
The current film also features a perfectly cast Pamela Anderson [
Baywatch (1993-97),
The Last Showgirl (2024)]. She’s Beth Davenport, the beautiful blond sister of a man whose death is initially believed to be a suicide. She comes to Detective Drebin insisting it was actually a homicide. Eventually, predictably, the two become romantically intertwined. Drebin being Drebin, it takes a while for him to catch on. Also featured is Paul Walter Hauser [
Richard Jewell (2019)] as Ed Hocken, Jr., Drebin’s friend/sidekick and the son of a character originally played by George Kennedy in the 1988 picture. The ultimate villain in this movie is nefarious rich tech guy Richard Cane (well played by Danny Huston), who plans to take over everything via an ingenious (and ridiculous) plot device.
Released on August 1st,
The Naked Gun has been a hit with audiences and critics alike (this one included). Aiden Kelley in
Collider writes: “
The Naked Gun’
s joke-per-minute ratio is truly astounding … for goodness sake, even the credits have jokes!”. And Johnny Oleksinski in the
NY Post raves: “
Someway, somehow, it’s the funniest movie to hit theaters in a long time.” I’ll conclude with the
Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith: “
In these days when flat out. comedy features are scarce., it's one of the most welcome tenants at the summer multiplex. A mid-movie snowman gag puts the new one over the top, bestowing on it the honor of being mentionable alongside its predecessors. It sets the lunacy level to ‘inspired’.”
Is it as funny as the 1988 original? I haven't seen that one in years. Could be. Probably is. All I can say for sure is it is damn funny. Laugh out loud funny.
85 minutes Rated PG-13 (!!)
Grade: A
In wide release. (No streaming dates have been announced at this time.)
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