Liam Neeson (Frank) and Pamela Anderson (Beth) in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures. © 2025 Paramount Pictures
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Leslie Nielsen, may he rest in peace, and Liam Neeson, may he keep punching throats forever, have more in common than you’d think. Nielsen was a 50-something journeyman actor probably best known as the stone-faced, Brylcreemed space captain from the 1956 sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet when his appearance in the 1980 comedy Airplane! gave him a second life as a full-time clown. He headlined the short-lived cop show parody Police Squad!, then its successful big-screen iteration The Naked Gun, then countless lesser send-ups, all built around his Olympic ability to keep a straight face while his ignorance and clumsiness wrought chaos around him. Nielsen’s pivot from humorless heavy to lovable buffoon presaged Neeson’s unexpected turn from venerable Oscar and Tony nominee to silverback ass-kicker in Taken and its assorted sequels and knockoffs.
Neeson is 73, already half a decade older than Nielsen was the last time he played Sergeant Detective Lieutenant (sic) Frank Drebin. Sure, Neeson would probably make a great King Lear, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as watching him carry the torch in the brand-new, 31-years-later third sequel to 1988’s The Naked Gun titled … The Naked Gun. It’s like how 2019’s Shaft was a sequel to the 2000 Shaft, which was a sequel to the immortal 1971 Shaft.
As in those movies, the connection is more familial than narrative: Neeson’s glaring, glowering, alter-ego is Sgt. Det. Lt. Frank Drebin junior. It’s the source of a great early gag, which shows us that his fellow cop, played by Paul Walter Hauser (currently appearing just down the hall in The Fantastic Four: First Steps), is playing the son of George Kennedy’s character from the earlier films. Nordberg, the injury-prone cop thrice played by O.J. Simpson, has an heir in Naked Gun ’25, too.
The new Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer (one-third of the Lonely Island music video parody outfit), is just as unmistakably the offspring of its forebears: It’s a high-velocity gag-o-rama that just barely hits 90 minutes if you stay through the credits. While its opening bank robbery sequence homages the opening of The Dark Knight—a film that’s now as old as Dirty Harry was when the 1988 Naked Gun directly spoofed one of the Clint Eastwood vehicle’s most memorable scenes—the latest sequel is, like its precursors, usually too busy puncturing film and TV conventions than to focus on a particular specimen. There’s a runner about Drebin ending every phone conversation by snapping the phone in half, some topical slaps at tech oligarchs—Danny Huston plays our nefarious villain—and one very good joke acknowledging that we’ve begun to pay attention to cops’ propensity for killing unarmed Black men in the decades since we last saw Drebin on the beat. But mostly this movie could just as easily have been made 40 years ago. Hell, it could have starred Neeson 40 years ago. When The Naked Gun came out at the end of ’88, Neeson had just appeared in The Dead Pool, the final Dirty Harry flick.
His isn’t the only pitch-perfect feat of casting. CCH Pounder, so memorable as one of the few honest cops in the great crooked-cop saga The Shield, plays the Chief of Police, and like Neeson, she seems invigorated by the chance to put a comic inflection on the kinds of tropey scenes she’s played dozens of times in her long career. More surprising still is a wonderfully funny turn by Pamela Anderson as the picture’s femme fatale, who comes into Drebin’s orbit when he’s assigned to solve her brother’s murder. A nightclub scene wherein Anderson stands up to sing a torch song that unravels into an atonal free-jazz scat thing is a standout, and its follow-up involving an occult-animated snowman is too good to spoil.
As The Naked Gun was winding down, having accomplished its diversionary mission, I thought of an even better 90-minute comedy, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. That masterpiece arrived at the end of 1941, when the United States had just endured the Great Depression and been drawn into a global war. It makes a mighty case that comedies are essential because of their frivolity, and for their ability to buoy our spirits in dismal times. Surely we can agree on that. And I’m sorry I called you “Shirley.”
The Naked Gun (PG-13, 90 mins.) opens Aug. 1.