Liam Neeson is Frank Drebin Jr in the brand new The Naked Gun. Sacrilege, then, or a surprise? Here’s our review.
I love the films of the late, great Carl Reiner as a rule, but 1993’s Fatal Instinct wasn’t one of his best. Riding on the coattails of the original The Naked Gun and the Hot Shots! films, it was one of a growing collection of spoof movies that misunderstood the ground rules. One: play it straight, and two: a visual reference to another film isn’t a joke. It’s just a visual reference to another film.
(See also: Epic Movie, Meet The Spartans, Date Movie et al.)
It’s no secret that the director of the original The Naked Gun, David Zucker, has thus hardly blessed this 2025 reboot with his best wishes, but I can’t help thinking he might be pleasantly surprised. As much as the idea of a Leslie Nielsen-less belated follow-on sounded like a terrible idea when most of us first heard it, it’s actually really rather lovely to report this avoids the assorted pitfalls that stood in its way. It’s not top tier, but it’s pretty good.
A few reasons why, but a lot of weight in particular is borne by the writing.
If you look at the first Shrek film, the writing of that is really tight, but it’s Shrek 2 that’s arguably the funnier feature. In the latter, it felt like space was afforded for Eddie Murphy to expand his patter at the expensive of a better worked film. This new The Naked Gun takes the path of the first Shrek. It feels like the jokes have been worked up on the page.
The script, then, is credited to Dan Gregor, Doug Mand and director Akiva Schafer. Given that this project has been in gestation for around half a decade now, with Seth MacFarlane at one stage set to direct, I’d imagine there were remnants of earlier drafts, but however the final, brief screenplay was arrived at, I’m gratified. Someone did the work.
Schafer has some form in this era, thanks to the peerless Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a movie whose name will follow him – for good reasons – for the rest of his days. Thus, he knows the pitfalls. His The Naked Gun for the majority of its running time thus becomes its own thing, while simultaneously adhering to the rules previously set down.
And, crucially, I found myself laughing. A lot.
I’m as wary of spoiling jokes in a film like this as I am writing plot spoilers for a Marvel movie, hence the slightly formality of tone for a film that’s relentlessly silly. But the silliness works because the tone is straight. It kicks off with the bank robbery sequence from the trailer, arguably the weakest set piece in it (does a Naked Gun film need such odd, off-putting visual effects work?). But from the arrival of the title card – brilliant – I was consistently chuckling.
Enter, then, Liam Neeson, as Frank Drebin Jr.
I guess at heart this was the gamble: could Neeson match the deadpan approach of Nielsen? Honestly? Yes. Schafer and his team fashion an old-style detective yarn (not a great one, but it does involve a plot device) around their characters, and Nielsen’s coffee-guzzling Drebin (hard relate) is a raging success.
The ensemble around him is a bit more mixed: Paul Walter Hauser is solid enough as Ed Jr, and Pamela Anderson’s Beth Davenport is good fun. But others struggle to cut through, I’d suggest – even Danny Huston’s oily antagonist. A special word of praise for the police chief and their spouse, though, one of a series of fine running gags you get for your seat price plus mandatory booking fee.
Awash with background gags and genuine physical craft, this new The Naked Gun does work, though. It runs out of steam before its 84 minutes are up (and don’t miss the end credits, not least if you’re a fan of the franchise), but also, it had far more steam in it in the first place than I was expecting.
Some enterprising individual may at some point bundle a Blu-ray of the film with a Bon Jovi T-shirt (it’ll make sense later), and I’m not sure I’ll ever look at an interview sequence in Line Of Duty in quite the same way again. And most people who write one of those ranking articles for websites will (rightly) put this second out of four in the franchise.
But also, I think most will rewatch this new The Naked Gun quite happily after they’ve seen it the first time, spot new things, and chuckle along. It’s studiously conscious of the mistakes films like Epic Movie and Fatal Instinct made, and it’s the best Naked Gun movie since the first one.
Even David Zucker might quite like it. Surely.
(but a very enjoyable
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