The Naked Gun (2025) – Surprising

Released: 21st August
Seen: 27th November

In the world of spoof comedies, one of the biggest franchises to ever grace the genre is the Naked Gun franchise. Based on the TV series Police Squad that was cancelled after a single season, Naked Gun was a massive cultural touchstone that spawned several sequels and is really the point where Leslie Nielsen went from serious actor to comedic legend (Yes he did Airplane! before this but you can literally look at his filmography and see that he pretty much never touches a serious film after Naked Gun). Of course the last film in the Naked Gun franchise was a little over 30 years ago now, Leslie has been gone for 15 so the idea of reviving the franchise is one that really shouldn’t have made it past the concept stage but somehow a new Naked Gun movie ended up being made and, to the shock of everyone, it’s actually really good.

The Naked Gun follows Frank Drebin Jr (Liam Neeson), your standard-issue action hero movie cop who will do anything he has to in order to get the bad guy, even if it means bending the law to the extreme. He’s been put on the case of a man who died in a car accident that he first brushes off as a suicide but when the victim’s sister Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) appears in Frank’s office, she tells the office that her brother would never kill himself and his death has to in some way be related to the mysterious calming device that he was working on at the time of his suspicious death. The path to figuring out the truth of what happened will take Frank and Beth into the world of billionaire tech mogul and electric car “Genius” Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a world where money talks and Richard can seemingly do anything he wants with impunity that doesn’t in any way resemble the current billionaire electric car making fuckboi you’re thinking about right now. Will Frank and Beth stop him? Probably, it’s a lighthearted action comedy, no way in hell is a film like this going to let the bad guy win.

This iteration of The Naked Gun really does take the time to modernise the material a lot more than I was expecting. For starters the film is very game to keep playing around with the modern perception of cops, even the good ones have done some corrupt shit that should probably be dealt with but won’t be beyond a slap on the wrist. Obviously with a franchise picking up over 30 years after the original was finished there’s a lot of things that no longer fly (comedy has changed, what was funny in the 80s just isn’t funny now, that’s how time and comedy work!) and this film is pretty great about updating not just the kind of comedy, but it plays around with the action movie references that we’ve gotten since the originals and even touches on parts of the original that aged badly (like, for example, the acting of OJ Simpson). 

What really helps this iteration of The Naked Gun work is the decision to lean fully into Liam Neeson’s image as a modern-day action icon. Ever since Taken, it feels like every year we get a new Liam Neeson action film (I may have reacted angrily to a few of those in the past) so to take that knowledge and use it as a base layer for this version of Frank Drebin to build the comedy from is a brilliant move. If you pulled the jokes from this film, you would get one of the action films that Liam has been making lately which helps him feel natural among the absurdity that he is surrounded by. He plays every scene with complete commitment, so serious you would think he didn’t realise he was in a comedy, which just makes everything funnier. Sure, he probably wouldn’t be considered as funny as Leslie Nielsen was (not many people are), but he finds a way to make this character his own in a way that’s still hilarious and pretty endearing.

The absolute undeniable star of the show is Pamela Anderson, who pretty much was born for this exact role and anyone who has been paying attention to her career knew she was going to be incredible at this. Yes, Pamela was THE sex symbol of the 90s but she has also always been absolutely hilarious with a gift for line delivery and comedic timing that has often been relegated to projects that don’t quite match her skillset. This film knows what makes Pamela funny and lets her shine, from playing with that image of her as a cinematic sex icon (seriously, her entrance scene is just her playing the classic Femme Fatale turned up to an 11) to letting her banter with Liam in scenes where she’s frankly funnier than anyone else on screen and I’m very much including the sentient snowman she shares a three way sex scene with. Frankly, we’re overdue for a Pam Anderson renaissance, and with this and The Last Showgirl, I hope that means we’ll get a lot more of her being the icon she truly is in cinema.

Outside of those two leads is where things are kind of off about the film. Everyone else’s performances are fine, but there’s nothing truly stellar there from anyone except maybe the police Chief Davis (CCH Pounder). The central evil plot is literally just the evil plot from the movie Kingsman, only nowhere near as hyper-violent or cool as that movie was (We’re not getting a great church massacre here, sadly) and the density of jokes is nowhere near what the original film had. Naked Gun as a franchise is a franchise known for stuffing its films so full of jokes that you will inevitably miss one just because the human brain can’t keep up with comedy flying that fast, that’s kind of what made them so hilarious because they fired off so many jokes in rapid succession that you were going to laugh at something just because it was statistically impossible for that many jokes to fail… here, they take a little bit too long for some of the jokes, to the point where several minutes can pass by without a joke hitting the audience. 

Even though the jokes might not be coming as quickly and frequently as one would like, they still manage to land pretty well. They layer the absurdity on until the film reaches breaking point, then keep adding more just because, and it does work more often than not. There are some points when they push a joke on too long, and it stops working, at least in this viewer’s opinion, but most of the time, they know when to let a joke stop and move on to the next bit. That repetition of jokes does kind of go hand in hand with that density problem; it’s hard to layer in 5 jokes when you take several minutes to let a single joke play out over and over again. This film seems to prefer letting that one joke linger on which doesn’t work as often as it thinks it will.

Most of the time, however. The Naked Gun is a pretty fun return to the classic franchise and proof that spoof horror films can still be funny. It’s a simple light comedy that plays with the audience’s knowledge of this franchise and the action genre in general to create a very silly experience that works more often than it doesn’t. Despite its flaws, it’s still an enjoyable enough film that manages to avoid pissing on the memory of the originals. It might not be as great as those were, but at least it’s not a complete insult to their memory.