Jonah Naplan   August 1, 2025

The first and perhaps only thing you may want to know before buying a ticket to “The Naked Gun” is if it’s funny. It is. You will absolutely get your money’s worth if you’ve come to the movie theater wanting to laugh. I giggled too many times to count. The dumber and more random the humor, the more I giggled. If that’s all you needed to know, farewell. But if you’d like more specifics, read on.

“The Naked Gun,” a reboot of a slapstick comedy trilogy from the ‘80s and ‘90s, created by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, and originally starring Leslie Nielsen, is a faithful homage that holds echoes of previous movies while still feeling like its own thing entirely. Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Nielsen’s character, who shares his father’s deadpan delivery and unflinching seriousness. The film opens with a bank robbery led by Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand) and squashed by Drebin, who infiltrates the crime scene in a schoolgirl disguise. This robbery has ties to a second case—a supposed suicide that brings the victim’s sister Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) into Drebin’s office and kickstarts a gushy romance complete with, in the grand tradition of the “Naked Gun” franchise, a surreal “intimacy” scene that would make any Bond girl cock an eyebrow.

Davenport believes that tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston) is the mastermind controlling all of this, but it’s up to Drebin to sort it out, working alongside his partner Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), and under the watchful eye of Chief Davis (CCH Pounder). The best thing about Neeson in this material is his ability to deliver all of his lines, no matter how stupid or ridiculous they may sound, with an entirely straight face. He may be even better at it than Nielsen, which is crazy considering how the latter kind of coined this type of deadpan humor in the original three “Naked Gun” movies, the “Police Squad!” TV show that inspired them, and one of my personal favorite comedies of all time, the 1980 spoof “Airplane!” He feels like a modernized version of a classic character without just repeating the “greatest hits.” The 73-year-old actor seems entirely new and refreshed after more than a decade of churning out lifeless action movies with titles like “Absolution,” “Retribution,” and “Blacklight.” “The Naked Gun,” in a sense, feels like his comeback project, a reminder to audiences everywhere that he’s a great actor when given the right material.

It’s kind of impressive how many jokes director Akiva Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand are able to pack into every minute of the film’s wonderfully short runtime. Some of the sight gags, verbal puns, and physical pratfalls fly by so quickly that you won’t be able to catch them all. It’ll launch one joke at you and your theater will laugh so hard that you’ll miss the next one. It’s comedy for the sake of comedy, something we don’t see very often anymore. Cameos are only used sparingly so that they hit harder when they do occur, and the movie doesn’t get overly political or needlessly raunchy, like so many other modern comedies do, because that has never been the brand of the “Naked Gun” franchise (although the original movies did include fictionalized versions of political figures such as George H.W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Pope but only so that they could be humiliated and subjected to Drebin’s hijinks—it was never about the nature of their character, more so their prestigious title).

“The Naked Gun” is yet another entry into the “legacyquel” genre, which includes movies like the recent “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” “Karate Kid: Legends,” and even “Top Gun: Maverick.” But it’s one of the best ones because there’s little about it that feels like merely a rehash of stuff we’ve already seen. It’s not just new characters going through the same motions as their predecessors; instead, it takes the gimmicks we know and love from the originals and twists them just well enough that the substance is entirely new but the spirit and soul still remains. There’s a few moments that parallel some of the most iconic sequences from the Nielsen movies—Drebin barely noticing as he hits bikers and runs over the sidewalk while driving; Drebin or other characters misinterpreting words and phrases and giving questionable responses; and Drebin narrating most of the movie as if he’s in a serious noir. You’ll be charmed by all of it, as if eating your favorite childhood meal for the first time in years.

There’s so many new, brilliant gags that I wish I could tell you about, too, but I won’t because they’re best experienced for the first time in a packed theater. Do not let any of them be spoiled for you. “The Naked Gun” will surely have the lasting power of some of the classic comedies from the early 2000s like “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” and any movies starring Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell because its gags feel fresh and will be referenced again and again for years down the road. And above all else, it’s a wonderful showcase for Neeson, who saved Jews as Oskar Schindler but also has a good fart joke or two up his sleeve.

Now playing in theaters.