The Naked Gun Review: Neeson Honours Nielsen

Led by a bravura Liam Neeson, The Naked Gun hilariously brings back spoofing that’s been missing from our screens for too long.

The Austin Powers series petered out over two decades ago, and even the horrendous Scary Movies came to a merciful end. The makers of 2025’s The Naked Gun have spotted a gap in the market, and deliver a well-timed, solidly made and (most importantly) rib-tickling good time.

The hapless but hilarious Lieutenant Frank Drebin was the defining role for the late Leslie Nielsen, and The Naked Gun 2025 wisely avoids recasting him. Instead, Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr., who has grown up to be just as capable and clumsy as his father. Neeson has demonstrated a sense of humour in the past (Rewatch Darkman for some impressively dark comedy), but he has also amassed a collection of action roles that are ripe for parody in themselves. Where Nielsen delivered his lines with a smile and his honey-smooth voice, Neeson brings his gruff brogue and growling grimace to the role of Drebin, and it plays beautifully. It’s impossible not to laugh seeing the lead from Taken dressed like a schoolgirl, suppressing farts or dangling from a ceiling with his pants down. Neeson’s never been funnier.

Indeed, many of the cast of The Naked Gun are allowed to flex their funny bones like never before. Pamela Anderson extends her comeback with her turn as Beth Davenport, the nominal femme fatale. Just as the original films allowed Priscilla Presley to join in the immature hijinks with the boys in the cast, the role of Davenport lets Anderson cut loose and send up her image as the blonde bombshell.

The whole cast, from Paul Walter Hauser’s fellow lieutenant to Danny Huston’s antagonist, relishes the opportunity to muck in on the gags and take the mickey out of themselves. All commit to the physical comedy and goofy one-liners like troopers. This is what’s required when mixing pratfalls with jokes that lapse into risqué (That O.J. Simpson gag from the trailer is just as surprising on rewatch). This same spirit informed the original films, and while times and tech have changed (Drebin Jr. falls afoul of an electric self-driving car several times), the sense of humour is much the same.

The cast aren’t the only ones with pedigree. Co-writer/director Akiva Schaffer and his Lonely Island trio gave us one of the most memorable spoofs of recent years in the form of fake behind-the-music doc Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. In hindsight, that film’s penchant for exaggeration and potentially lame (but still brilliant) jokes plays like an audition tape for a new Naked Gun. While Schaffer is the only Lonely Island member involved in The Naked Gun, their blend of goofy humour with smart joke construction is all over his latest film. Co-writing with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, they take the lead from the original films and jam as many gags as possible into every moment. Innuendoes, visual jokes, puns and so many more are lobbed at the audience with immense speed. If one gag doesn’t work, there’ll be another one along in about five seconds.

All these jokes are housed within a perfunctory plot centred around Huston’s big bad manipulating brainwaves with a plot device (No, really. The brain manipulator is called a P.L.O.T. device) to bring society to its knees. At 85 minutes, The Naked Gun is efficient, but there’s no sense of urgency to it. There’s only so much tension or stakes you can demand from a spoof, but this film’s momentum is derived from the gag rate rather than the narrative. It makes no bones about being a joke delivery mechanism.

Neeson chews the scenery and Anderson vamps it up, keeping you watching even when the gag rate threatens to dip. For every handful of gags that work, an occasional clanger lands with a thud (Cultural references are always riskily subjective), and there will always be some repetition. Various gags and plot points borrow from the likes of Austin Powers, South Park and Mission: Impossible – Fallout. If The Naked Gun can’t be original, at least it cribs from good influences.

It was tricky to predict how something like The Naked Gun could be redone as tastes change and attention spans wane. The new film succeeds by sticking to the originals’ ethos; keep the gags coming, the jokes lewd and the delivery deadpan. Comedies that run far longer than this wish they had its commitment to just making the audience laugh.

The Naked Gun (2025) will be released in US & Canadian theaters, in UK & Irish cinemas, and globally in theaters on August 1, 2025.