The Naked Gun

Though we live in an age of reboots and sequels, “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (1988), genuinely one of the greatest movies ever made, was one that seemed sacrosanct. What compelled director Akiva Shaffer to give it another go, I don’t know; maybe he thought resurrecting a fallow franchise that sadly fizzled out in 1994 with the suitably subtitled “The Final Insult” would be the perfect way to give a beaten-down world a laugh. If so, he succeeds in abundance by a creating a self-aware police procedural parody in the same vein as his Team ZAZ forefathers. Self-aware, but not really revisionist. This is not “The Naked Gun” commenting on the “The Naked Gun”; this is just “The Naked Gun” (2025). And though it does also employ an actor mostly known for being serious in service of straight-faced comedy, Liam Neeson, he is perhaps the one way in which Shaffer’s version most deviates from its predecessor.

Neeson is Frank Drebin Jr., son to Leslie Nielson’s Frank Drebin Sr., who like his father, becomes involved with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson, a real hoot) and finds himself on the trail of a dastardly technocrat (Danny Huston) who wants to save humanity by transforming it into survival of the fittest. That plot sounds more akin to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” frankly, which is maybe why that old TV series is referenced, not that “The Naked Gun” has anything to do with the plot. The storyline is strung to hang jokes on and Shaffer and his two co-writing cohorts Dan Gregor and Doug Mand succeed in so much as far more jokes land than miss, dead space and straight parodies of other movies proves minimal, at least one joke made me laugh so hard I cried, and most importantly, it never runs out of steam, not even through the closing credits. Even so, only on occasion does it evoke the wild spirit of the original, like in a snowman-starring montage, or in concert with Neeson’s performance.

Nielson was a buffoon in so much as he was a straight man in a whole world gone crazy. Neeson is a straight man, too, but he infuses the part with more simmering rage than Nielson’s mere bewilderment. Indeed, Neeson does not have the way with malapropisms and puns that his predecessor did; those tend to fall flat. But he manifests this hysterical kind of aggression and resentment, and this “Naked Gun” is at its best when yoking its gags to Neeson’s air. Indeed, skepticism of the police has always been buried in these movies, like it or not, and Shaffer brings it up in the mix. Drebin Jr. is often driving into pedestrians just like his dad, but Shaffer eschews the rule of thumb that comedy is best in long shot to show such comical hit and runs in close-up, rendering the character less oblivious than indifferent. Best of all is a sequence seen mostly through a bodycam that does not feature Drebin Jr. intoning “I am the law!” like so many renegade movie cops before him but instead brilliantly lives it.