I needed something stupid funny like breath in the summer of 1982. My grandmother had recently passed a mere 14 months after her husband did, proving at least to me conclusively that even elderly people can die of a broken heart. It did leave me with an opportunity to squat in her apartment, giving me the first genuine freedom I’d ever experienced, but it also left me on my own for the first time. You’d think that would be joyous, but I was overweight, underpaid and both the Mets and Yankees were downright awful. Not a lot of fun at my “bachelor pad”.
So when ABC snuck in a silly little six-episode summer filler from the producers of AIRPLANE! that took the same sort of dizzy humor that made that send-up of that genre so successful into a spot-on send-up of cop shows called POLICE SQUAD! I was at least momentarily diverted for at least that short spell into something I actually looked forward to watching. To this day, any time I rewatch the over-the-top opening credits, voiced by the very same underrated Hank Simms who boomed out the guest stars in so many Quinn Martin-produced procedurals that my family addictively watched, I giggle like a schoolgirl when Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln is briefly introduced just as a bullet slices through his top hat.
That failed summer spoof became a true cult classic and an obsession for Paramount executives, enough so that they reworked the concept in a trilogy of NAKED GUN movies that themselves became even huger cult classics. It remade Leslie Nielsen as a comic genius and were at least in my world as anticipated as anything that would hit a theatre. Were it not for the poor timing of a noticeably weaker third installment and the fact that Nielsen’s partner in crime-fighting just happened to be charged with a double homicide who knows how long it might have gone on for?
But today, three decades removed from that and faced with a world where crimes are seemingly being rehashed and committed with even less retribution than O.J. Simpson experienced in his lifetime, we are blessed with a reboot of the NAKED GUN franchise that, pure and simple, seems to be bringing a whole lot of other people the same sort of comic relief that I needed from the show that spawned it. BOSTON.com’s
Sometime in the 2010s, amidst the ascendance of Marvel and the decline of Judd Apatow’s stable of slackers, movie studios almost entirely abandoned the theatrical comedy. The nominal replacement – action movies with occasionally quippy dialogue – has left comedy fans utterly bereft. “The Naked Gun” would warrant a trip to the cineplex in any decade. But in 2025, its commitment to delivering the highest volume of jokes per minute is not only admirable, it’s without parallel.
UPI NEWS’ Fred Topol added some details that back up Slane’s conclusion:
The Naked Gun opens with a Dark Knight-style bank robbery, immediately undercut when the loot is blatantly revealed to be the Maguffin that it is. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), the son of Nielsen’s Frank Drebin, foils the robbery, but the leader gets away with the item. Drebin Jr. is also assigned to the automobile death of Simon Davenport, whose sister Beth (Pamela Anderson) suspects foul play. The plot has the complicated machinations of a modern-day action movie, but it is merely there to hang jokes upon, like the original film trilogy.
Neeson is the right kind of modern star to place in this kind of comedy. Nielsen had already done Airplane! before playing Drebin Sr., but what made his deadpan so funny was that he had a body of work as a dramatic actor. Naked Gun plays off of Neeson’s intense action persona, only now his very particular set of skills include absurd fight gags. Trailers show him stabbing bad guys with the end of a lollipop, but the rest of his Naked Gun repertoire makes even less sense. Neeson also delivers both voiceover and in-scene dialogue with dramatic intensity that makes it take a second to realize he’s told a poop joke. That delay makes the poop joke exponentially funnier.
And not to be outdone, this is also a welcome remaking for Anderson, a point TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek drove home with enthusiasm in her review:
We’re always making room for new stars and fresh new faces, as we should: a love of beauty, in all its forms, is what keeps our love for the movies going. But what about a face that feels new yet familiar at the same time? Sometimes the face we didn’t know we needed is one that we’d written off, or just forgotten about, long ago.
Welcome to the new age of Pamela Anderson. Anderson is the best thing about The Naked Gun(…)Neeson is perfectly fine in The Naked Gun, which opens with a few promising gags before running aground in the last third. But he’s at his best in his scenes with Anderson, and that tells you something. She’s a performer who reflects light rather than soaking it up. That was clear from her gorgeously wistful performance in Gia Coppola’s 2024 The Last Showgirl, in which she played a veteran member of a Las Vegas dance revue about to be closed in favor of a flashier, tackier show. Anderson’s character in that film, 57-year-old Shelly, is both optimistic and pragmatic; she’s seen it all, and she’s made mistakes, but she can’t help looking toward the future. Through much of the movie, she wears little or no makeup—a performer’s job is to create an illusion, but off-duty, the only person she can be is herself.
Anderson does, of course, wear makeup in The Naked Gun; she’s playing a femme fatale, after all. But there’s still something intensely intimate about her performance style, even in this comedy. Anderson is only 58 years old; it’s more than a little twisted that we feel compelled to celebrate a woman who “looks her age”—whatever that really means—in Hollywood. Shouldn’t we have gotten beyond all that, now that we’ve allegedly become a society that accepts all ages, shapes, and sizes, applauding beauty in its myriad forms?
There are other sirens calling out to me, most notably the encouraging casting of my old SHIELD colleague C.C.H. Pounder as the police chief that Drebin reports into. Knowing full well her capacity for comedy from the cast parties where her true wit and sardonic nature regularly broke me and my colleagues up I fully expect her to deliver a performance akin to what Harry Morgan brought to the reinvented version of his legacy DRAGNET character Bill Gannon in Tom Hanks’ sendup of that franchise in the 1987 theatrical reintrepretation. And there’s apparently much more to look forward to as Slane reminds:
“The Naked Gun” is by no means a beat-for-beat remake. Director Akiva Schaffer – of The Lonely Island and SNL fame – retains the ZAZ spirit while adding his own modern flourishes. There are echoes of Schaffer’s underrated Disney noir “Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers” in Drebin’s investigations, and moments of boundary-pushing unreality that were a hallmark of Schaffer’s SNL Digital Shorts and his 2016 showbiz satire “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” A mid-film romantic montage that echoes the “I’m into Something Good” scene from the original “Naked Gun” is a perfect example, with Schaffer taking the parody in new and unpredictable directions.
So yep, I’m as giddy with anticipation for this visit with a Frank Drebin as I was lo so many summers ago when POLICE SQUAD! saved me. And that’s even with the Mets and Yankees playing a lot more competitively now than they did then.
Until next time…