Film Review: The Naked Gun (2025)

 

Sexuality/Nudity (Im)Mature

Violence (Im)Mature

Vulgarity (Im)Mature

Anti-Catholic Philosophy (Im)Mature

I was and remain a huge fan of the Zucker/Abrams/Zucker style of comedy.  Few movies have made me laugh as much as Airplane! and The Naked Gun films.  It is an often imitated style that very rarely is able to capture the precise comedic recipe of those classics.

So how does the new Naked Gun hold up?

I would say that the first half had more laughs than most movies in the last decade.  But by the second half it was about half as funny.

The movie is a soft reboot of the original franchise.  Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr.  He and Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) are detectives at Police Squad.  While investigating a car crash, he come across the deceased's sister Beth (Pamela Anderson) and he runs afoul of a tech billionaire named Richard Cane (Danny Huston).  Frank then stumbles and bumbles his way into a high stakes confrontation.

Anyone who knows these types of movies understands that the plot is just the frame on which the jokes are molded.  And to be fair to all of the Naked Gun movies, they actually had fairly straightforward (though silly) plots.  The point of the story is to give you situations where you can make the audience laugh.

Writers Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and writer/director Akiva Schaffer push incredibly hard in that first half.  The opening scene involves Frank infiltrating a bank robbery.  What follows is wonderful absurdity.  You can tell that they are making fun of the types of action films that Neeson has been making for the past fifteen years.  Humor is incredibly subjective, so I would understand if it is not to everyone's taste.  I like the goofy, non-sensical, meta humor that these types of films are known form.  The first joke of the movie is when one of the main villains (Kevin Durand) steel something from a safety deposit box that is literally called the "P.L.O.T. Device."  The movie spends time on Frank's body cam footage where he has diarrhea.  The movie also relies heavily on puns.  In one scene Beth says that she moved to Los Angeles for college.  Frank asks, "UCLA?"  She responds, "I see it every day.  I live here."

If these are not your type of jokes, then this movie may not be for you.

The movie also does one of the things I like in comedy which is the shotgun approach to joke telling.  There are so many jokes peppered throughout the movie, but upfront and in the background that the joke-to-runtime ratio is very high.  Most comedies now may have a big laugh every 10 minutes or so.  But I was laughing pretty consistently throughout most of the first act.  

The jokes also lack maturity and dignity.  When Frank is running his interior monologue about Beth's body, it is shockingly vulgar.  There is also a play on the Austin Powers shadow gag that is totally juvenille.  To say that the humor is scatological would be an understatement.  This is the type of humor that would make 10-year-old me laugh and it has the same effect today.  Again, this is not the type of movie that anyone would call refined, but that is the point.  But this isn't a movie for little kids.  There are too many jokes that are naughty in the same way as an episode of Benny Hill (for those to young to get that reference, ask your parents).

Neeson does a great job for the most part.  Leslie Nielson was at his funniest in these movies when he played Drebin with serious intesity.  When Neeson follows Nielson's example the jokes soar.  When Neeson tries to be funny, it takes a lot of the wind out of the sails.  Thankfully, he pushes hard on this character.  He has great chemistry with Anderson who also has better comedic instincts than I would have thought.  There is a scene where she has to do some jazz scatting that is wonderfully absurd and she totally commits to it.  I love Paul Walter Hauser in everything, but he understands that he is the straight man to Neeson and he does that role wonderfully.  Huston also understands his assignment to be the over-the-top bad guy and does so with the commitment we've seen him have in dramatic films.

Schaffer directs a lot of the scenes like an action movie, down to the camera angles and set lighting.  It doesn't look as much like a sitcom set as the original films did.  But there is an artificiality to the scenes that matches the lighter tone.

My biggest complaint about the movie is that it isn't able to sustain its high level of humor all the way through to the end.  I can actually pinpoint where things take a turn.  Just like in the original film, there is a romantic montage part way through the movie.  Unlike the first movie, this montage goes on way too long.  There is a reason that brevity is the soul of wit.  Some comedies think that they are funnier than they are and delay dismounting from a gag.  The same is true with this one.  The sequence goes on past its laughs.  And when that happens, when the audience has time to catch its breath and sit with a joke that isn't as funny, it sucks a lot of the energy out of the room.

That isn't to say that the second half of the movie isn't funny.  It is still funnier than most comedic films.  But there is a nagging sense of disappointment that it doesn't end the way it begins.  It isn't a fumble.  It's a strong first half, but a slow second half that still manages to stay ahead by the points.  (Although you should stay through the credits.  One of the joys of these movies are the silly things that they hide as the credits roll)

Sometimes you just want to go to the movies and feel the sweet release of uncontrollable laughter.  If this type of humor is up your alley, I would check it out.