The Naked Gun (2025)

Review: written November 2025

This Naked Gun is less rapid fire, more shooting blanks.

They say it takes real brains to make dumb comedy. Well this dumb comedy is, unfortunately, simply dumb. You can tell it has been made with somebody that is very familiar with the originals, since the format has been largely adhered to. The combination of sight gags, play on words and farce feels like it should have a higher success rate – and yet, I found myself watching, recognizing the gags as they came up, and for most of the run time remaining impassive, with barely a titter or chortle elicited.

Plot, for what it’s worth, involves Liam Neeson playing the son of Frank Drebin . He’s a loose cannon, always in trouble with his lieutenant for breaking the rules, but somehow manages to end up being the hero, more by accident than design, of course. When a bank robbery leads him to tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston), Drebin Jr teams up with Pamela Anderson to thwart his maniacal plans through various tortuous set pieces.

a few gags kind of work – it’s fair to say this could be a lot worse, but somehow there is an essence of the original just missing – the gags are oversold, and the chemistry with the cast is absent. Leslie Nielsen played his spoof roles completely straight for the most part. It was his deadpan reaction to ludicrous events that would tip understanding you’d seen a gag, into laughing along with it. Here, Neeson gurns his way through the gags – He is playing a parody, not playing it straight to sell the gags – and somehow that small change takes the ‘charm’ (if that’s a word that applies to Naked Gun) away for this viewer.

Huston does what is needed as a topically techy bad guy, and Pamela Anderson seems a logical choice as a romantic foil for Drebin. There are some good gags here – and it will likely be enough to stop this disappearing a la Pink Panther – the Steve Martin version. But it’s not the inspired reboot I’d hoped, and I can’t say I will be inspired to reload this particular naked gun.