In a fake public service announcement released alongside the revival of the classic Leslie Nielsen spoof franchise The Naked Gun, new star Liam Neeson begs us to take pity on the poor, endangered studio comedy. There are fewer now than ever before, and their decimation is robbing us of the precious opportunity to “share a smile, a laugh, and even the occasional groan with the people in [our] very own community”, he explains.
The Naked Gun, then, is the genre’s last stand. It’s a callback to one of the funniest trios to have ever operated – brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, aka ZAZ, who were also behind the spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) and the disaster movie spoof Airplane! (1980), the latter frequently cited as the funniest film ever made – and directed and co-written by Akiva Schaffer, one-third of ZAZ’s closest successors, The Lonely Island.
Though Schaffer, alongside his regular collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, is best known for The Lonely Island’s string of Saturday Night Live parody songs (among them “Dick in a Box”, “I’m on a Boat” and “I Just Had Sex”), the trio were also behind one of the most underrated comedies of the 21st century, 2016’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which giddily tore into the kind of self-produced, self-mythologising musician doc that’s since only increased in popularity.
When it comes to The Naked Gun, Schaffer, alongside writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, has done his part of the job beautifully. The movie seamlessly revives ZAZ’s mile-a-minute patter of sight gags, puns, and general buffoonery. It’s such relentless comedy that it starts to imitate the beats of a horror film: when there’s no joke on screen, the body starts to tense up in anticipation of what’s inevitably around the corner. You leave the cinema half expecting somebody to have snuck a fart machine into your pocket.
It’s a “legacy sequel” delivered with a smirk: Neeson plays Lt Frank Drebin Jr, son of Nielsen’s Lt Frank Drebin; Paul Walter Hauser plays Capt Ed Hocken Jr, son of George Kennedy’s Capt Ed Hocken; and Moses Jones plays Nordberg Jr, son of OJ Simpson’s Det Nordberg (and, yes, the elephant in the room is smartly addressed).
The original Naked Gun was a cinematic spin-off of the TV comedy Police Squad!, and as we’re so culturally removed now from the shows that series was lampooning – think M Squad and Dragnet – this new film, by default, has a broader scope: it’s noir meets Mission: Impossible, with references to Sex and the City, Disney adults, and Oldboy, plus a distinct dose of Lonely Island-esque surrealism (I’m not sure ZAZ would have come up with the sequence involving an enchanted snowman, but it’s hysterical all the same). A few of the old jokes are recycled, but there’s no sense that the film is relying on nostalgia, nor is it particularly invested in meta-comedy or deconstruction.
Pamela Anderson turns up at Drebin’s office as Beth, whose brother was killed in the suspicious crash of an Edentech electric vehicle, with a trail that leads all the way back to the company’s CEO Richard Cane (Danny Huston). A part of Beth is certainly informed by Anderson’s history as a pop culture icon and her more recent reclamation of that image. Mostly, she’s a femme fatale who’s sillier and weirder than Priscilla Presley was ever allowed to be back in 1988 (two words: scat singing).
Neeson isn’t quite the same as Nielsen, who exploited his run of dramatic roles as trustworthy authority figures for pure deadpan comedy. Yes, he’s an Oscar nominee, but he’s also the man with a “particular set of skills”, already associated with a slightly absurd brand of action film. His Frank comes with a mischievous twinkle in his eye – he’s loving every second of it, and retroactively inviting us in on the joke of some of his past career choices.
The question of how Neeson compares to Nielsen matters less than how perfectly he fits into a 2025 Naked Gun, which subtly shifts the punchline away from the self-seriousness of cop shows and towards the self-seriousness of cops themselves, in a world increasingly suspicious of their intent and authority. This Frank Drebin insists that the past was better, when “the only things that were electric were eels, chairs, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago”.
It’s not exactly revolutionary stuff, but it does remind us, despite what some might claim, that comedy can still take risks while maintaining basic social awareness. So, shine on, Naked Gun – save the world, and maybe the studio comedy in the process.
Dir: Akiva Schaffer. Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston. Cert 15, 85 mins.
‘The Naked Gun’ is in cinemas from 1 August
