‘The Naked Gun’ review: outrageously stupid comedy reboot fails to keep up with the classics

Leslie Nielsen must be farting in his grave. The star of the original Naked Gun trilogy – a once little-known Hollywood straight man turned comedy legend – who reportedly never left home without his pocket flatulence machine, now lays under a headstone that reads “Let ‘er rip”. The Naked Gun name supposedly died with Nielsen, as did the kind of comedy film that ruled the playgrounds of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

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The originals honed a very specific brand of silliness – juggling slapstick, word play, visual gags, background jokes and movie spoofs all at the same time. The pace was relentless and they did it all with a completely straight face; Nielsen setting the tone as a stiff, old-fashioned, leading man in a Looney Tunes cop show.

Thirty-one years after 1994’s Final Insult, Detective Frank Drebin is back. Kinda. This reboot stars his son (Liam Neeson) and a once winning formula that doesn’t hit like it used to. “Daddy, I want to be just like you,” says Drebin Jr, talking to a photo memorial of his dad. “But at the same time I want to be completely different and original…” It’s a good joke but it’s also the biggest problem with the 2025 sequel: trying a bit too hard to be the same and different but never quite managing either.

Danny Huston plays Richard Crane, an improbable tech billionaire who wants to use a mind-altering sonic wave to revert everyone back to their primeval state, kick-starting an apocalyptic global reset that he’ll avoid in his underground bunker. Into the mix is femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) who thinks her scientist brother might have been murdered.

There’s only one cop for the job, of course, and that’s Drebin – the man who beats up bad guys with their own severed arms, drives through waves of pedestrians without opening an eye and thinks manslaughter is pronounced “man’s laughter”.

Neeson is no Nielsen but he does a good enough job. It’s hard to think of anyone else with the deadpan gravitas who could have pulled it off anyway and there are times where he almost nails it. Anderson is a good casting as well – funnier than she’s been before and given slightly more to do than you’d expect from Drebin’s early internal monologues (“she had the kind of body made to hold up a head…”)

Director Akiva Schaffer (The Lonely Island) and producer Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) get so much right it almost works. The problem is they can’t keep it up. The timing slips, the padding feels lumpy and the hit rate drops. A hilarious love montage goes big on wonderful weirdness while an even goofier final showdown falls flat, the whole thing stretched thin over 85 short minutes and struggling to keep pace with its much older predecessors.

The new Naked Gun also lives in a weird hybrid world that never quite feels right – still occasionally lampooning classic ‘50s cop shows and film noirs but also now crowbarring in janky gags about Teslas and the Black Eyed Peas.

Then again, there’s a lot to be said for a film that tries this hard to be stupid. The Naked Gun isn’t big or clever and that’s just fine – silliness has been missing from comedy cinema for far too long now. It might not smell quite as ripe as the original trilogy but it’s never not wonderful to hear Frank Drebin let ‘er rip on the big screen.

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