Not as Bad as Expected

For a time, the team of Zucker-Abrahams-ZuckerThis comedy collective, also known as ZAZ, consisted of two brothers and their best friend, and they went on to create some of the best parodies of their era. reigned supreme, at least as far as comedy fans looking for parody works were concerned. While their Box Office results might have been hit or miss, from the highs of Airplane! to the low reception for Top Secret!, their fans loved what they were doing and wanted more. That all culminated with their biggest theatrical success, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, a massive hit that ended up launching a three-movie series for Paramount.

But that first The Naked Gun film would also prove to be the last full collaboration for ZAZ as a full team. Each member of the comedy team would end up going off to make their own movies. Jim Abramas worked on a few films, including both Hot Shots! movies as well as the fourth Scary Movie. David Zucker made BASEketball and three of the later Scary Movie films. And Jerry Zucker made Ghost and then a whole lot of terrible films. What was clear was that, separately, none of them really had the parodic power they had when they worked together. They all worked on parodies on their own, but none were nearly as good, or successful, as their earlier collaborations.

And then, of course, the parody genre as a whole went down the toilet anyway. The success of the original Scary Movie (which they didn’t work on) led to a lot of really awful parodies, like Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, The Starving Games, and Superfast! These films, one after another, were terrible (although many of them were financially successful). The parody formula wore out the whole genre, and as quickly as these later films became de rigueur they then fell out of favor, with audiences wanting nothing to do with parodies at all. Even if any of the ZAZ team had wanted to make another The Naked Gun film, that just didn’t seem possible.

And, in fact, it wasn’t any of the ZAZ members that ended up bringing the series back. For that you can look no further than Seth MacFarlane, a modern comedy mastermind with many, many works under his own belt (Family Guy and The Orville included). With Seth on board, momentum was gained to actually get a The Naked Gun reboot underway, and by the summer of 2025 that film was finally in theaters. Titled, simply, The Naked Gun, it was billed as a legacy sequel continuation for the franchise, with new series lead Liam Neeson taking over. The only question was if the film could really hold up to the legacy of the original movies?

Now, I’ll be honest: this is a The Naked Gun film so plot doesn’t really matter. Even the best of the original movies (and even the episodes of Police Squad! that came before it) really only had plots involved as a way to loosely hang a whole bunch of jokes. Whenever the story needed to move forward, characters would conveniently get that information by any means necessary, including talking to a very well-informed shoeshine guy. The plot was inconsequential in the long run, so long as the jokes were good. And, thankfully, for the most part the jokes in this new The Naked Gun film are really quite good.

The movie starts off pretty well, with a series of solid, running gags. Neeson’s Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the original protagonist from the series, gets called in to handle a bank robbery, but he goes so over the top in dealing with the bad guys that he gets pulled off the case, forced to investigate a seemingly unrelated car accident which, then, of course, ends up being directly tied to the main case he was booted from. So there’s a lot of back and forth gags about him being a loose cannon, always doing things his way, along with all the classic deadpan delivery of jokes you’d expect from a The Naked Gun film.

It’s actually nice to see that the film sticks closely to that deadpan style, at least for its first couple of acts. You need a dry, dramatic actor in the center to make everything feel weirdly grounded despite how silly everything going on around him might be. Neeson was the perfect actor to play that part, fitting very clearly into the same kind of mold that Leslie Nielsen was in before he was tapped to play the deadpan doctor in Airplane! It’s a role you wouldn’t expect for Neeson, but he plays it to a tee.

And, in fact, much of the movie seems calibrated to work right within the framework of The Naked Gun and its universe. Over-the-top gags, like using a giant claw machine to pull a car out of a lake, are paired with simple verbal gags (“take a seat”, “no thanks, I have plenty of chairs at home”) to create that constant barrage of jokes that are a series hallmark. Perhaps not all the jokes land as well as they could, but then that was also the case in the original films and television series as well. In a film like this, the point is to launch as many jokes as possible at the screen and hope some of them stick, which they do in this film.

Really it’s only in the last act, when the villain’s big plan (which I won’t spoil) is revealed that the film falls apart. It gets too broad, too over-the-top, too silly and it loses that deadpan angle that made the humor of the first two acts work so well. This isn’t just a flaw of this movie, of course, since the previous three films also all had their moments when they went too broad and lost the thread. It’s just a pity that after all this time away, and with such a great job the creative team were doing in the first two acts, they couldn’t keep the reins on this film and let it go broad. Likely they felt like they had to go big for the climax, which is why the last act feels the way it does, but it doesn’t work, especially in comparison to what came before in the film.

Still, I wouldn’t say this completely ruins the movie as there’s still plenty to like. Neeson is fantastic, and I think he’s paired well with Pamela Anderson, who is just as game at being deadpan whenever something silly is going on. They have great chemistry together, and they are both able to sell two people falling in love (as is required by the story) even as all the jokes continue to come. In fact, there’s a great bit, a montage where the lovers go off to a cabin for the weekend, that has some of the best gags in the film and I laughed uproariously here. This was the perfect tone for the film, deadpan, strange, and silly, all wrapped into one, and it makes the best point of the film, and the moment right before it all fell apart (as this then led into the last act and all the problems that arose).

There’s so much great material here that I want to call this film a success. It’s just that last act that keeps it from true greatness. It’s a solid, funny movie that, at times, really does live up to the legacy of the previous movies. It’s just that sometimes the legacy it lives up to is the worst parts of the previous films as well as the best bits. This does feel like a proper legacy sequel for the series, and if further films in the line game out I’d certainly be willing to check them out (on streaming, if not in theaters). But The Naked Gun gets just enough wrong that I can’t call it a film I’ll watch over and over again. I might revisit it at some point, a few years from now, when I’m bored, but it’s not an instant classic. If that last act had been better, though, this film absolutely would have knocked it out of the park.