The Naked Gun

The Lonely Island's Akiva Schaffer helms this remake of the much-loved David Zucker/Jim Abrahams/Jerry Zucker spoof movie classic, The Naked Gun. The original 1988 film was based on the ZAZ team's TV series Police Squad!, which was a ratings disaster but became a cult favorite show, as its six-episode run was one of the funniest things ever broadcast on television (though only the first four shows actually made it to air). Part of the reason the ZAZ humor didn't translate all that well to TV was that spoof comedy plays 1000 times better when seen with a big crowd. When they reappropriated the key elements (and many of the best jokes) into a movie, it became their most long-lasting hit. It spawned two sequels and established that the spoof movie was a viable genre unto itself, and that their hit Airplane! (1980), which had entirely reinvented the spoof movie in ingenious ways, was not just a one-time fluke, since their follow-up to Airplane!, the brilliant WWII movie/Elvis movie spoof Top Secret! had tanked at the box office.

Part of the reason The Naked Gun films play so much better to modern audiences than Airplane! or pretty much every other spoof movie ever made is that, unlike disaster movies, horror movies, espionage thrillers, post-Vietnam military actioners, or historical epics, rebellious cop action thrillers haven't changed all that much in the last forty years. The pacing is faster and the body counts are higher, but the conventions of cop pictures have been remarkably durable with each passing decade. This new Naked Gun is certainly shot and paced like a modern cop film, which is not to its advantage in several ways, but is nevertheless entirely appropriate.

73-year-old action star Liam Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., who, like his father (embodied by the immortal Leslie Nielsen in the other films in this series), works for Police Squad, a special unit of the LAPD. While Neeson's late career reinvention into an action hero, which began in 2008 with the first of the Taken movies, gives him an appropriate pedigree, he's not an actor known for playing comedy, far from it. Yet in Schaffer's hands, he fits like a well-worn glove into the role of the clueless detective. Pamela Anderson (the Baywatch beauty enjoying a late-50s career resurgence after her 2024 indie-drama The Last Showgirl), a crime novelist whose brother's murder Drebin was investigating before his chief (CCH Pounder) reassigned him. The two team up to uncover a sinister plot by a tech billionaire played by the always enjoyable Danny Huston.

Schaffer pulls off an impressive feat, not just remaking a classic movie without embarrassing himself but delivering one of the funniest studio comedies we've gotten in many many years. It's an old saw to complain that movie studios don't make comedies anymore. But they don't. And when they try to, they make crap like The Fall Guy, Anyone But You, or Bros—movies so manufactured, so self-conscious about the ways they try to get laughs, and so unpleasantly slapped together that any potential laughs are stifled. The Naked Gun is made in the same, go-for-broke, anything goes spirit of the original movie and TV show. Schaffer puts in just the right amount of references to the original and does just the right number of fresh spins on gags and jokes from the source without directly recycling any of the same material.

I was impressed by the many ways Schaffer and co-screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand found fresh ways to pull off familiar bits. I was surprised by how well the Lonely Island style of parody aligns with the ZAZ team's inspired blend of slapstick, satire, low-comedy, and crazy sight gags. The movie is even able to provide some goofy but pointed commentary on contemporary themes and situations in ways that won't come off as either woke or reactionary to any audience. Even more admirable were the three times I laughed all the harder from sheer astonishment that, after countless spoof movies made since the ZAZ team gave us Airplane, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun, these young filmmakers managed to find baked into the genre conventions to mock that no film has ever done before. These are things that would have played just as funny forty years ago and have been sitting there, ripe for satire, for all this time, yet no one thought to point them out until now!

Shot by Brandon Trost and edited by Brian Scott Olds, The Naked Gun looks as good or better than many contemporary action movies and a whole lot better than most recent comedies. The pacing is breakneck, which means background sight gags don't play nearly as well as those in the ZAZ pictures, and the third act awkwardly runs out of laughs simply because no comedies paced in this way can sustain more than fifty-five minutes of uninterrupted laughter. Still, when was the last time we got a movie with fifty-five minutes of uninterrupted laughter?

I had no interest in seeing this movie when it was announced. Then several discerning critic friends I follow on Letterboxd started rating it 3 to 3.5 stars. So I figured I should give it a shot and called a couple of my funnier pals to make plans to see it on a Friday night. It then hit me that it had been well over fifteen years since I'd done this once common act of making plans to see a movie with friends on a weekend night. That's a pretty sorry reflection on the state of cinema these days. If you and your buddies are not fanboys of some IP-generated franchise, do you even plan to see movies with specific people on a particular night, knowing that it will enhance your enjoyment of the film? We don't get the kind of movies that engender that type of social interaction anymore. And that's too bad. So kudos to Schaffer, the screenwriters, and producers Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins for delivering the goods and making a silly comedy that had me laughing out loud at nearly every gag and joke.