Liam Neeson’s late-career hard pivot from every dad’s favorite grizzled thespian to every dad’s favorite grizzled action star may have seemingly come out of nowhere, but this new lane was one the Irish actor embodied so thoroughly that nobody really minded it; in fact, we all more or less embraced with open arms this new era of ass-kicking and name-taking between moments of fatherly bonding. After a while, though, there were only so many “Run All Night”s or “Cold Pursuit”s we could handle before we’d start to miss the time when films like “Silence” were closer to the norm than the outlier in Neeson’s oeuvre.
The man has always attested, however, that he’ll continue to crack his knuckles and throw his punches for as long as his body would allow him to, but with “The Naked Gun” (2025), Neeson seems to have applied that ideology to a career swerve even sharper and more unexpected than the last. And depending on how it goes, this new shift—one towards unabashedly inane action comedy—may very well prove an even more welcomed one. It helps that Neeson’s latest lease-on-life is being supported by a proven franchise formula.
Normally, this sacrilegious exhumation of a beloved comedy series would be the first sign of the Neesonian Apocalypse, but with the help of Lonely Island alum Akiva Schaffer, the spirit of “The Naked Gun”, and all of the stupidity that comes with it, remains intact with every shred of dignity that Leslie Nielson first brought to the function when he executed a love scene dressed head-to-toe as a giant condom.
This time, Neeson plays not Lt. Frank Drebin, but Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., son of Nielson’s famed Police Squad investigator. The apparent star figure of his offshoot of the L.A. police department, Drebin’s lawless approach to the law gets him in hot water with his superiors (sound familiar?) just as a new threat emerges. That threat comes in the form of tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston; though Kevin Durand more overtly resembles Elon Musk, he has to settle for the role of the Musk insert’s right-hand goon), whose orchestration of a bank robbery is intended as the start of a master plan to send all the world’s non-elites into a primal, murderous frenzy.
Drebin stumbles—as he so often does—upon this plot when a demotion to collision inspection leads him to a particular accident that shows hints of foul play. It certainly appears that way to the victim’s sister, Elizabeth (Pamela Anderson), who pushes Frank to investigate the matter with greater urgency despite the heat coming down on him from his superiors. Soon, he’ll come to learn that these two cases… are the same case.
True, “The Naked Gun” isn’t entirely a paragon of originality even without accounting for the fact that it’s a soft reboot. Not only does the villain’s plan sound suspiciously like the exact plot of “Kingsman,” but Schaffer and his co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand find themselves just as willing to curb some broad joke ideas from other sources; a little “Family Guy” here, a little “Austin Powers” there, a little… “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” somewhere else? But as is always the case with comedy (with any facet of storytelling, really), a stale idea can ring with the novelty of a first-time laugh with just the right push on the finer details.
“The Naked Gun,” on that front, never once lets up during its brisk 85 minutes on the potential to squeeze in a hearty chuckle. Nearly every minute of this thing is packed with a gag so unapologetically stupid that you’d have to respect the gall if you weren’t already keeled over catching your breath.
Making every effort to subvert his self-serious demeanor with the invasion of a ridiculous pun or a sharting joke—or even a few well-placed jabs at the complete lack of accountability facing the police force as a larger institution—Neeson is game for precisely the level of shameless nonsense that Schaffer wishes to draw out, and the film’s undying commitment to every last one of its mile-a-minute bits ensures that it’s bound to hit the mark on a basis of statistical probability alone.
Naturally, there remains the possibility that, like its predecessor(s), “The Naked Gun” and its particular shade of stupidity might prove somewhat flattened with a few decades of hindsight—maybe Nielson’s inaugural outing felt more humorous in its baseball-centric finale that proves to be about as exciting today as an actual game of baseball.
If nothing else, though, what may risk being dated in the future will most certainly function as something of a cheeky time-capsule; a “Spirit Halloween” sight gag may not make sense in 2040, but it will certainly give an indication of what this moment in time looked like when we were on the precipice of a looming recession, at a moment so depressing that a few mindless laughs may well have been the only way to cope with it all.
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