Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Danny Huston

Director: Akiva Schaffer Year: 2025 Runtime: 1h 25m Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Naked Gun is a 2025 reboot of the classic Naked Gun franchise with Liam Neeson playing the role of Frank Drebbin Junior, Pamela Anderson as his love interest, Beth Davenport, and Danny Huston as the villainous tech-bro (is there any other kind?) Richard Kane.

The movie is directed by Akiva Schaffer and produced by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane. While McFarlane was not involved in writing the script, his influence can still be found in certain scenes.

2025’s The Naked Gun pays homage to the original series, starring Leslie Nielsen, while putting a modern twist on the types of gags pioneered by the original Naked Gun creative team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker (aka ZAZ).

So it’s madcap ZAZ humour with a modern twist. But is it funny?

Goodyear? No, The Worst

The movie industry is recalibrating.

And what new form it takes largely depends on the movies we watch in cinemas, and those we chose to ignore.

Marvel seems to be getting its groove back, but nobody seems to care. Yet Superman is proving that claims of superhero fatigue may be overblown.

Sinners has proven that original IP can still perform well at the box office, but tell that to the idiots who keep green-lighting Jurassic Park movies.

Speaking of idiots, the success of the Minecraft movie is proof that there are even more morons in this world than even I suspected, while more cerebral and subdued movies like The Alto Knights, Black Bag and Eddington keep getting unceremoniously dumped from screens.

And then there are the cinema-first blockbusters. Movies like Mission Impossible Final Reckoning and F1, betting big on practical effects, stunts and spectacle to coax audiences back into the cinema – only problem is they seem to be using AI to write their scripts.

So what about comedy?

The Naked Gun is a fresh cinematic experiment, testing how audiences reaction to seeing organic comedy back on the big screen.

No doubt the execs at Paramount Pictures are watching this one closely and, thus far, must Shirley be happy with the result.

The Naked Gun is a 2025 reimagining of the Leslie Nielsen movie franchise of the same name, from the “ZAZ” production team (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker), this time with Liam Neeson in the lead playing Frank Drebbin Jr.

Like A Blind Man At An Orgy, I Was Going To Have To Feel Things Out

This is another one of those fire-the-trailer-guy situations.

When I saw the first trailer for this I fucking hated it!

I wrote it off as the latest tacky cash-grab, appropriating another one of my 80s favourites and replacing it with cringe humour.

Not only that, it was also going to drag my favourite hiphop track of all time down with it. (Because you best believe this blog’s down with the sound called BDP!)

It doesn’t help that we’ve been drowning in belated sequels and unwarranted reboots for years now.

The week I went to watch this movie, Happy Gilmore 2 dropped, decades after the original was made.

Meanwhile, before The Naked Gun started, we had to first sit through trailers for a War of the Roses remake and Spinal Tap II, a sequel to a movie that’s almost as old as I am.

Oh, and did you know there’s a Spaceballs 2 on the way?

Why? Because the search for more money continues as Hollywood doubles down on nostalgia, not so much because it’s out of ideas, but because it thinks we’re not interested in new ones.

There’s plenty of people out there with cool original ideas (me, for starters), but they rarely get a shot. And in a world where movie studios are fearing for their future, they’re even less likely to bet on unproven concepts. 

Which is why we keep getting more and more of the same old recycled shit.

So, I hope you can understand why I wrote this movie off based on its trailer and never gave it a second thought, that is, until I started hearing reviews about it from people whose opinions I trust.

Learning of Seth McFarlane’s involvement in the movie piqued my interest. Because if there’s one person who gets surrealist comedy and sharp dialogue, it’s the creator of Family Guy.

Third, a friend of mine reminded me of Neeson’s perfect deadpan delivery in that classic clip with Ricky Gervais and Warwick Davis.

And that’s what every actor needs to be a true Drebbin.

Aside from the odd quip here and there, you have to play it 100% straight and sincere.

Otherwise, the comedy doesn’t work.

And that’s why Liam Neeson works in this movie. Years of Taken clones have conditioned us to expect a specific cinematic persona, and The Naked Gun subverts all that by getting Neeson to play a clown.  

(As an Irishman, I have to say we’re all very proud of Liam Neeson and all the important work he’s done during the Taken franchise by scaring Americans away from Europe.)

While Neeson’s past catalogue itself is ripe for parody, this new Naked Gun movie avoids the temptation to do straight-up movie spoofs.  

Sure, the opening sequence has hints of The Dark Night, with early 2000’s colour grading and Zimmery string arpeggios, but it never goes further than lose vibes.

No doubt you’ve already seen the Drebbin disguised as a schoolgirl sequence, which formed a major part of the trailer. It was this, more than anything else, which convinced me this was going to be a stupid movie.

I mean, I wasn’t wrong. There are a lot of incredibly stupid fucking jokes in this movie. I’m talking Austin Powers-level stupid. But there’s an equal amount of smart ones to balance it out.

It’s different jokes for different folks.

If you have seen the trailer the first five minutes of the movie will already be familiar. But once we get past that amusing OJ reference, fresh gags start coming at a relentless pace.

There was a couple I wished I could go back and rewind, “Wait… Go back, what did I just see?” but they’re quickly tossed aside like so many disposable coffee cups.

15 minutes in, the overall mood in the cinema appeared to declare that “comedy is back!”

I went in with modest expectations, not expecting to laugh as much as I did. I don’t think I’ve laughed as much in a cinema since 2006’s Borat, almost 20 years ago.

The dialogue is classic Police Squad style, but with a modern twist. It shouldn’t work in 2025, yet it does. There’s almost that sense of relief, we all laugh as one, yeah, there it is, that’s the good stuff!

We’re living in a cynical age, no doubt, but not so cynical that we can’t still find classic Shirley-isms and ZAZ-esque slapstick funny.

Notably absent are parodies of other movies, TV shows, ads, etc. And rightly so.  

When the ZAZ movies first hit screens, culture was a lot more homogenous and hit movies ran for months at a time before enjoying endless reruns on TV.

Take the 1980 classic Airplane! It arrived at a time when cinema was the dominant art form and popular movies made indelible marks on our culture.

This is why audiences continue to recognise the references to movies like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever.

But even then, only American audiences got the references to domestic TV shows and coffee commercials. (The rest of us just laughed along anyway.)

It wasn’t an issue at the time but as the ZAZ movies progressed, the shelf life of their pop culture references began shrinking.

Post-ZAZ, we endured a decade of crap like Scary Movie and Meet The Spartans, pumped full of lazy references to movies and pop culture, which were already dated by the time of release.

Those movies are credited with killing the spoof genre.

However the spoof format only works when we have a shared pop cultural experience to draw on, which was already eroding in the early 2000s and is almost completely bereft in the atomised culture of 2025.

So how do you lampoon cinema in the age of viral TikTok videos when even big tentpole movies from Marvel are failing to draw audiences?

Answer: You don’t bother and just ramp up the absurdity instead.

The Good:

Liam Neeson: The golden rule of comedy is this; you can go as crazy as you want, but there always needs to be a straight man. This is why Leslie Nielsen worked so well in both Airplane! and The Naked Gun.

Liam Neeson gets it. Above all else, Frank Drebbin needs to be deadpan on the surface.

And once Neeson starts spewing the cheesy gumshoe one-liners we can all settle into our chairs thinking, “yep, he’s a Drebbin alright.”

So, because Liam Neeson works, the rest of the movie works, making it feel less like a modern movie trying to imitate the ZAZ classics and more like a modern addition to existing canon.  

Pamela Anderson: What perfect casting! Pamela Anderson fulfils the same role that Lisa Marie Presley did in the original movies, and the effect is much the same.

Much like Presley in the 80s, Pamela Anderson’s comedy talents may well be the best surprise of 2025.

Her chemistry with Neeson, both romantic and comedic, lights up the screen, and you can tell she’s having fun with the material.

The Bad:

It’s A Hoot: There are a few gags that I found cringe, but I’m willing to brush them aside. But because I need to put something here, I’m opting for the owl sequence which appears late in the movie and, even by this movie’s standards, is pretty fucking dumb. 

The Shirley:

The Naked Gun knows its limits; oftentimes, you can hear the writers slamming the brakes on a ZAZ-inspired gag, stopping as close to homage as possible without ever crossing the line of pandering.

They hit the brakes too early on a couple of gags, but that’s ok because it means they don’t come across as trying too hard to make a Naked Gun movie. Which makes it feel more like the real thing.

We also get some clever 21st-century updates to classic ZAZ gags. The PonziScheme.com arena showdown, for example, or the Police Squad-inspired ending that descends into an existential nightmare. (Again, wondering whether McFarlane had a hand in this one?)

Sure, we get zero movie parody sequences but who cares? It’s more than made up for with all the coffee cup gags which, for whatever reason, tickled my funny bone the most.  

In fact, at times this movie often feels less like The Naked Gun and Airplane! and more like the 1984’s Top Secret, which, although heavy on spoofs, went harder than any other ZAZ movie on visual gags, clever camera shots and optical illusions, the kind you’d wear the tape out rewinding and replaying back in the VHS days.

Standout Scenes

• The Opening Scene: The movie opens to frantic Hans Zimmer-style strings and a Dark Knight-inspired bank heist which gets subverted in the most ridiculous way possible. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know what to expect, and having watched the movie in its entirety, I now appreciate the genius of it. It’s as if the movie is saying, “Oh, you were expecting wall-to-wall movie parodies? No, that’s not happening!”

• The Body Cam Scene: This scene got the most laughs in the cinema. The timing, how it builds, the dialogue that goes with it, everything about it is crafted to induce cascades of belly laughs. The last time I heard this much laughter in a cinema was almost 20 years ago, as Borat and Azamat had their epic naked cringe-fight through the corridors of a hapless American hotel.

• McFarlane’s Snowman: The snowman sequence has to be a Seth McFarlane gag, right? It’s the least ZAZ-style thing in the whole movie and instead feels like it was lifted straight from an episode of Family Guy. (Which, itself, had an abundance of ZAZ homages.)

Nice Beaver

You can’t blame me for expecting this to be yet another cynical remake.

How wrong I was.

The Naked Gun takes adapts the humour pioneered by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker in a way that feels fresh.

And while it doesn’t capture the same magic of the original movies – they come from a different era, after all – that irreverent spirit remains.   

For many, this will be their first introduction to the character of Frank Drebbin, no doubt resulting in renewed interest in the Leslie Nielsen originals.

And like Leslie Nielsen, Liam Neeson plays it straight, never once winking at the camera while leveraging the gruff on-screen persona we’ve come to associate with him.

After more than a decade of coasting along on a endless stream of Taken derivatives, The Naked Gun reminds us why he’s a star.

Pamela Anderson’s performance, meanwhile, showcases untapped comedic talent and represents the best comeback story of 2025.

Is this reboot a classic for all time like the originals? No. But then I don’t think such a cultural phenomenon is even possible in 2025.

It did achieve what few movies have managed, however, it had me laughing throughout, along with the rest of the audience.

So yes, we can still all get together and have a good laugh – and that’s something we needed to be reminded of this year.

I also suspect that a single quip from Liam Neeson helped save the cinematic experience more than three hours of drivel waiting to see Tom Cruise dangle from a biplane.

Admittedly, the re-watchability of this movie is considerably lower than the IP it’s based on, but then who cares?

It’s packed with laughs, and it will do your soul good to let go and embrace the silly.

Oh yes, and in case you were wondering, of course Weird Al Yankovic makes a cameo.

Related Viewing

Naked Gun Trilogy: Sure, they’re showing their age in places, but Leslie Nielsen’s original Naked Gun trilogy contains some of the greatest comedy moments ever put on screen.

These are, the 1988 original, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, and the two sequels, 1991’s The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and 1994’s Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult.

The latter is the weakest of the three, but, as a movie buff, I still love the finale, which takes place at the Oscars and is therefore packed with ’90s movie references.

If you remember these the first time round, no doubt revisiting them will give you a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

If you’re younger, the warm and fuzzy will no doubt be replaced with, “Wait, is that OJ Simpson?”

Eeeh, yeah. But if you can ignore that one piece of dodgy casting, you’ll get to enjoy some of the greatest gags ever put to celluloid (that’s what they used before shooting on digital kids!)

Police Squad (1982): Given how much of a flop this show was, it’s a miracle we got a movie based on it, never mind three.

The series was cancelled after six episodes but every single second is packed with top-tier comedy writing, featuring the kind of wordplay that would give Abbot and Costello a headache.

Top Secret (1984): The ginger stepchild of the ZAZ movies famously bombed at the box office because it was just too damn weird – though that’s precisely why I’m recommending it to you.

It’s a demented mashup of WW2 movies, Cold War spy movies and those gawdawful cheesy movies Elvis was forced to make.

And if you think those three things would prove difficult to merge together, you’d be 100% right.

Though it does provide a broad canvas on which to unleash a non-stop barrage of optical gags and absurd visuals, the likes of which I’ve never seen before or since.

The movie has the distinction of being Naked Gun alum Weird Al Yankovic’s favourite movie of all time. It’s also where Val Kilmer makes his screen debut, as well as being one of the very last movies to feature Peter Cushing, in one of the cleverest pieces of visual comedy ever put on screen,

I’m not going to say it’s the funniest ZAZ movie, but it’s hands down the weirdest.