Review Roundup: Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun

To be fair, Neeson has more career capital to lose than Nielsen did. He deadpans it impeccably, but perhaps doesn’t quite have Nielsen’s eerie innocence. In any case, it doesn’t stop this reboot of the Naked Gun franchise from being a lot of fun: amiably ridiculous, refreshingly shallow, entirely pointless, and guilelessly crass.

Paramount has been trying to reboot this franchise for years, with their efforts constantly getting hung up on concerns over outdatedness and sensitivity: Spoofs were old hat; cop flicks were forgotten; these types of jokes were too vulgar; blah, blah, blah. Now, things have finally gotten to the point where movie comedy itself feels like an anachronism. But here comes The Naked Gun, unabashedly crude and stupid and brilliant and weird and obvious and current and archaic and, finally, fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious. See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.

[W]hile the prospect of retooling a cop sendup like The Naked Gun might seem to smack of the same reactionary conservatism that has spurred the rest of America’s recent comeback stories (e.g., measles, coal mines, the McDonald’s Snack Wrap), Schaffer’s version manages to capture the classic spoof magic without turning back the clock. That’s a delicate tango in the context of an increasingly rare — or all but obsolete — studio movie that exists for no other purpose than to make people laugh, but it’s one this hilarious new take on the old ZAZ masterpiece pulls off with a rose between its teeth.

[T]he movie earns hearty guffaws through to the end, its goodwill intact. Neeson — who is paying respectful homage to Nielsen’s sterling work while also satirizing the tough-guy career he’s built for himself since Taken — never betrays a hint of embarrassment or discomfort in being asked to do the dumbest of things. He’s game and limber, even if one does see his stern face and yearn for Nielsen’s more elastic mugging.

It’s not exactly revolutionary stuff, but it does remind us, despite what some might claim, that comedy can still take risks while maintaining basic social awareness. So, shine on, Naked Gun — save the world, and maybe the studio comedy in the process.

If you don’t like a joke in the 2025 reboot of The Naked Gun, just wait: Another one will be arriving in seconds. Starring Liam Neeson, the relaunch of the classic comedy series captures exactly what made the original, and other movies from the team behind Airplane!, so essential: An almost non-stop onslaught of silly and random moments, rejecting any attempt at logic to instead go for the gut — which is to say, the belly laugh.

Nothing is sacred here and everything is up for humor, including the franchise itself. The movie features witchcraft to animate a sexy snowman, a double entendre conversation about turkeys. There are references to Sex and the City, Bill Cosby, Tucker Carlson’s End of Men idea about radiating genitals, pop-up Halloween stores, and TIVOs. And, as always in these films, the jokes fly by so fast and so shamelessly that by the time you realize you didn’t like one, three funnier ones have appeared.

This novelty — and the willingness of Lonely Island director/co-writer Akiva Schaffer (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Hot Rod) to get silly — allows The Naked Gun to successfully follow in the pratfalling footsteps of the earlier trilogy, mostly unmoored from a cohesive genre and instead incorporating tropes from film noir, action movies, and spy thrillers into its silly string of loosely connected gags. The farce lands a less-lethal (but still effective) number of punchlines mostly thanks to a game Liam Neeson, who proves that he’s not just the serious-faced septuagenarian whose name sounded most similar to “Leslie Nielsen.”