When I heard that someone had made a new Naked Gun movie with Liam Neeson taking up the lead role opposite Pamela Anderson, all produced by Seth MacFarlane, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the news. The original movies were the product of the comedy team of Zucker-Abrams-Zucker, and their comedic style was pretty unique. Though they made only a relative handful of movies before going their separate ways–indeed, Jim Abrams died recently–I certainly didn’t think the man behind Family Guy was going to be able to match it, and I am so over that guy’s stuff. But then the reviews started coming out, and they were good. Like, really good. Like, Rotten Tomatoes had a higher score for this movie than any of the older ones. Maybe I misjudged the movie despite not caring for the trailers all that much save the OJ joke and maybe the first time I saw Neeson reveal himself to be disguised as a little girl to foil a bank robbery.
Oh, and Neeson may be dating his co-star Pamela Anderson right now. Good for them.
Frank Drebin Jr (Neeson) is a lieutenant in Police Squad just like his late father, but he tends to bend the rules too much, even breaking the law, to bring down the bad guys. That doesn’t sit well with Chief Davis (CCH Pounder), so he’s taken off a bank robbery that he’d somewhat foiled at the start of the movie and put onto car crashes, looking into the mysterious death of a software engineer whose sister Beth (Anderson) insists could not be a suicide as initially reported. The dead man worked for tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Houston), and given that man is basically a huge philanthropist, he doesn’t seem the type.
Except, of course, he is the type, and Drebin finds himself working back on his original case all while trying to keep Beth away from it despite her desire to see her brother’s killer brought to justice. But Cane’s plans won’t be good for anybody, and Frank’s already under suspension for his actions. But you know what? Plots in these movies don’t matter. They exist solely as a delivery system for jokes, and there are plenty on display here. Otherwise, I might get to wonder how the seventy-something Neeson is playing a character born in a movie that is only a little over 30 years old or how the relatively diminutive Paul Walter Hauser is supposed to be the son of big ol’ George Kennedy. All that matters is how good the jokes are.
That’s the good news actually: the jokes are quite good. The old movies would basically toss out a new joke every 45 seconds or so, so even if you didn’t like a joke, you wouldn’t have to wait long for the next one. The key was the rapid-fire nature of the humor, told in a combination of slapstick, visual gags, word play, and above all, treating the movie like it is a serious movie in the same genre. The actors play their bits straight, and it isn’t hard to imagine Neeson and Anderson as something of the 2025 equivalent of Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley. Plus, Anderson really shines here, suggesting she may be getting a much-needed career renaissance between this and last year’s The Last Showgirl.
Now, I won’t say all the jokes worked for me. An extended musical montage sequence of Beth and Frank out on a romantic getaway weekend didn’t do much for me. I will also say that the movie probably works best with a crowd where the laughs intensify with the shared experience that sometimes makes something funny even funnier, much like my experience with the original with Leslie Nielsen. I didn’t experience that here, due to the fact there were only about 5-6 other people in the screening room with me for that late morning matinee. But really, this may be the closest it is possible to get to a ZAZ movie without the ZAZ team, and they did a good job here. All I know is, I did laugh out loud a few times, and was generally amused by the rest. It was, in fact, a worthy continuation.
Grade: B+
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