Review: THE NAKED GUN (2025)

 by Rob DiCristino

Your favorite dick is back.

My mom has this story she likes to tell about me as a kid; I’m maybe nine or ten years old. As the story goes, she’s passing by my room one evening when she hears this delirious giggling from the other side of the door. It’s not full-bellied laughter, necessarily. It’s more staccato. Intermittent. Real hyena shit. Now, I like to think that I laugh about as vibrantly as most folks — Anyone who’s been in the Bromleys’ basement during #FThisMovieFest knows what it sounds like when a joke grabs hold of me and won’t let go — but to this day, my mom says that the giggles provoked by 1991’s The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear were something different. Something special. It was the laughter of a kid with nothing on his plate. No cares. No responsibilities. No disappointments or heartaches. It was the kind of genuinely innocent laughter that many of us lose somewhere on the long road to adulthood, but it’s what made the sight gags, wordplay, and hard-boiled satire of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker Naked Gun movies so formative for so many kids like me.

Now, just like every library title owned by America’s risk-averse, intellectually bankrupt entertainment conglomerates, The Naked Gun is back! Liam Neeson stars as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., the son — don’t ask when or how; it doesn’t matter — of Leslie Nielson’s bumbling Police Squad gumshoe. Richard Jewell’s Paul Walter Hauser is Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (son of George Kennedy’s original, of course), and Pamela Anderson is femme fatale Beth, a true crime writer who helps Drebin untangle a deadly conspiracy. The murder victim is her brother, an engineer in the employ of an Elon Musk-y futurist named Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who, like most supposed visionaries, is actually a narcissistic bigot with plans for world domination. With his top secret P.L.O.T. Device — yes, it’s that kind of movie — Cane aims to turn 99% of the population into violent animals, wait out the chaos in a bunker with the other 1%, and eventually emerge to rule a new empire. And so once again, the fate of humanity rests on the shoulders — and, at one point, the genitals — of Lt. Frank Drebin.

As it was in the original series, Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is a thinly-plotted bundle of goofs, pratfalls, and non-sequiturs arranged in the style of a pulpy noir mystery. As it was in the original series, the film’s star spent his early career in dramatic roles before earning more popular recognition from genre work, which adds a kind of cock-eyed gravitas to his deadpan performance. As it was in the original series, the jokes come at lighting speed and work roughly twice as often as they don’t, meaning it only takes about ten seconds to shake off a dud before you get a winner. While some of the sensibilities have been updated for the 2020s — Schaffer and his team are well-aware that police incompetence is not quite as funny as it may once have been — The Naked Gun is very much a Naked Gun movie, and that effort to Be the Thing rather than just Pay Homage to the Legacy of the Thing makes it a far more satisfying experience than something like 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, a movie desperate to convince us that the knock-off that sired it is actually cannon cinema.

But how’s Liam Neeson? Well, he may not have the puppy dog charm of his cinematic father — or his “daddy,” as he says far too often for a man in his early seventies — but there’s a real genius to casting an actor of his pedigree to succeed Nielsen. It’s fun to see Liam take a chance! He never overcomes a certain stiffness with the dialogue, unfortunately, and his attempts to evoke Nielsen’s blustery overconfidence feel strained and affected, but anyone who spent that long stuck in DTV thrillers deserves the opportunity to try something new. Pamela Anderson deserves a comeback, too, and she fares far better here than she did in last year’s overrated The Last Showgirl. Their standout sequence — second only in the whole film to an inspired Mission: Impossible riff — is a romantic weekend montage that finds them conjuring, befriending, and forming a love triangle with a demonic snowman. Schaffer is having the most fun when he’s tapping into that Lonely Island-style absurdity, and if The Naked Gun misses opportunities, it’s in not including more of these extended gags.

Did we need another Naked Gun movie? Absolutely not. Will its release cause a spike in Paramount+ subscriptions as Zoomers scramble to catch up with all the Gorbachev jokes from the originals? It’s very unlikely. But as this Naked Gun’s messaging came into focus — essentially, technocrats like Cane thrive on making our lives stressful, and the best thing we can all do for each other is calm the hell down — it dawned on me that Schaffer might not just be spoon-feeding me empty nostalgia like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or Jurassic World: Rebirth. It occurred to me that The Naked Gun might be something different. Something pure. Dumb as rocks, yes. But pure. It isn’t trying to show me things I recognize from my childhood. It’s trying to give me feelings I miss from that childhood. Look, I won’t ever be that ten-year-old kid laughing in his room again. I have a ton on my plate. I have cares and responsibilities. I’ve shouldered my share of disappointments, and I don’t mind telling you that my heart is aching. But boy, it sure was fun to giggle like that little fool one more time.

The Naked Gun hits U.S. theaters on August 1st.