In the opening moments of Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun, a bank vault erupts, not for gold, not for diamonds—but for a briefcase marked P.L.O.T. Device. If you laughed, congratulations: you’re the target audience. If not, there’s always Happy Gilmore 2 waiting at home in your Netflix queue.
This isn’t so much a reboot as a genre exorcism. The Lonely Island trio—Jorma Taccone, Andy Samberg, and Schaffer—don’t revive The Naked Gun as much as they rewire it. They’ve taken the defibrillator paddles to the ribcage of ZAZ-style spoof and shouted, “CLEAR!” And, improbably, it lives. Hell, it thrives. The DNA of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker is preserved here not through lazy reference, but reverent replication: machine-gun gags, pun parades, and wordplay that would make Groucho Marx raise an eyebrow.
Enter Liam Neeson, solemn and granite-faced, the straight man in a funhouse mirror. As Frank Drebin Jr., he’s less a renegade cop and more an existential crisis in a trench coat. He asks, “Who’s going to arrest me, a cop?” and delivers it with the sincerity of a hostage negotiator. This is performance as performance art—a man who has punched wolves and saved daughters now fumbling through pratfalls like it’s Shakespeare.
Plot? Sure. There’s a robbery, a shadowy tech bro (Danny Huston doing his best Bond villain impression), a femme fatale (a surprisingly perfect Pamela Anderson), and some truly inspired lunacy involving cell phone mind control. But none of it matters. Not really. It’s a comedy in the purest form: a joke delivery system masquerading as a feature film.
The writing team (Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Schaffer) wisely ditches pop culture one-liners in favor of timeless absurdity. You’ll hear jokes that could work in a Buster Keaton silent reel and others that sound like they were written while drunk texting your therapist.
Is it perfect? No. But when the laughs miss, they don’t linger—the film just throws another pie in your face. Clocking in under 85 minutes, The Naked Gun has the decency not to overstay its welcome. And when one gag flops, the next is already knocking.
And then there’s Neeson, the comedic sledgehammer. He treats every line like it’s a courtroom monologue. No winks. No smugness. Just unflinching commitment to pure stupidity. It’s Taken meets Police Squad!—and somehow, it’s one of his best performances. Yes, I said it. Because in a world addicted to irony, sincerity in service of idiocy is a rare art.
Late in the film, a cameo teases what The Naked Gun might’ve been with another actor—someone more obvious, more wink-wink. That alternate timeline? A crime. Neeson is the reason this thing lands. He’s not above the nonsense. He is the nonsense.
