‘The Naked Gun’ Review: Akiva Schaffer’s Hilarious Police Spoof Is the Funniest American Movie in Years

Liam Neeson lives up to Leslie Nielsen's legacy in a laugh-a-minute legacy sequel that proves comedies belong in theaters.

Writing about spoofs is sort of like dancing about architecture: Film critics almost never get paid to do it. Indeed, Akiva Schaffer’s “The Naked Gun” might be the first theatrically distributed movie of its kind since the likes of “They Came Together” (2014), “Fifty Shades of Black” (2016), and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), all of which already felt like relics from a time when audiences were accustomed to such gleefully absurd gag-a-thons — a time when men were men, women were women, and O.J. Simpson was a Scandinavian detective named Nordberg. 

We used to live in a country where comedy was an entire genre unto itself, as opposed to a brief distraction that a squinty-eyed Chris Pratt tried in vain to search for between action scenes. But good news! Just like open political bribery and a monopolistic control over the entertainment industry, Paramount is taking a bold step towards making theatrical comedies viable again. 

And while the prospect of retooling a cop sendup like “The Naked Gun” might seem to smack of the same reactionary conservatism that has spurred the rest of America’s recent comeback stories (e.g., measles, coal mines, the McDonald’s Snack Wrap), Schaffer’s version manages to capture the classic spoof magic without turning back the clock. That’s a delicate tango in the context of an increasingly rare — or all but obsolete — studio movie that exists for no other purpose than to make people laugh, but it’s one this hilarious new take on the old ZAZ masterpiece pulls off with a rose between its teeth. 

Here is a comedy that pines for the way things were without sacrificing any of the progress we’ve made to bring them back. A comedy that constantly uses the real world to set up its jokes, but seldom relies on it to deliver their punchlines — and tends to land some incredible haymakers whenever it does. A comedy that references everything from Elon Musk to racially motivated police violence without letting its virtues get in the way of its laughs, and even trots out the r-word in a scene that has the power to make activists and edgelords alike both cackle at the same joke (although the Elon stand-in is clearly meant to be the butt of it). While that choice might sound like the symptom of a feckless movie that’s afraid of alienating some portion of its audience, in context, it epitomizes how brilliantly this “Naked Gun” navigates the difference between timeless stupidity and retrograde madness. 

And boy oh boy, is it teeming with the first one of those things. Just to get it out of the way: “The Naked Gun” is almost objectively the funniest movie of the year — not because its humor will hit every audience as hard as it did mine (I don’t think I’ve seen a room full of critics howl that hard since the Lemmons scene in “The Wolf of Wall Street”), but rather because nothing else has aimed for even a fraction of the same laughs. Other 2025 films have jokes; this one is jokes (even the title card is a fantastic goof), and most of those jokes are really, really, really fucking funny. 

Even the ones that aren’t have the benefit of being delivered by Liam Neeson, who brilliantly subverts his late-career screen persona as an outside-the-law vigilante — and revisits the gravelly deadpan he brought to his two-faced law-enforcer in “The Lego Movie” — for an inspired comic performance worthy of the Drebin family name. Grizzled and angry where his Police Squad daddy (Leslie Nielsen) was daft and entitled, Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. is a widowed copper struggling to play by the rules in a new era of police accountability. 

Frank longs for the days when a badge allowed a middle-aged white man to play god; the days when cops didn’t have to pretend like there were consequences for shooting people, and there wasn’t any bodycam footage of him using his gun to cut the bathroom line at a coffee shop. It’s like Frank’s world stopped moving forward when his wife died (he still uses a TiVo), and now he’s just doing what he can to keep it on its axis. And also drinking a lot of coffee. So much coffee. A fresh cup is handed to him from off-screen in practically every other scene. 

Beyond that, this legacy sequel adheres to the same old story as David Zucker’s first “The Naked Gun” film. Not in the “boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day” sort of way, but in the “Frank swoons for a smoky-voiced femme fatale while trying to solve a case that hinges on a rich businessman’s plan of using mind-control on the masses” sort of way, complete with the usual noir affectations. 

The new bombshell is a blonde named Beth (Pamela Anderson, paying delightful homage to Priscilla Presley), and her brother has just been found dead in his don’t call it a Tesla at the bottom of a lake. All signs point back to his trillionaire boss Richard Cane (Danny Huston, having the time of his life), whose electric car revolution is secretly funding a far more sinister plan. A plan that only Beth, Frank, and his partner Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser, giving wonderful straight man as the son of George Kennedy’s character) have the power to stop before it threatens to tear an irreparable hole into the heart of the social fabric. Absurdity ensues.

At the risk of overstating the sociopolitical relevance of a movie in which the henchmen patiently wait in a single-file line while a “customers served” scoreboard keeps track of the ones who Frank has already karate-chopped in the neck, such ridiculousness finds new purchase in a world that no longer makes a lick of damn sense. Recognizing that audiences are more primed than ever to laugh at the kind of straight-faced absurdity that passes itself off as seriousness, Schaffer and his co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand simply — if also expertly — give us permission to do that again. 

This “Naked Gun” doesn’t teach people how to watch it, bend over backwards trying to keep up with the times (post-ZAZ reference points like “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” are either introduced with near-miraculous elegance, or used to make Frank seem like a living anachronism), or belabor the need for its own existence in a too-siloed world desperate for strangers to laugh together again. For one thing, film critics are happy to do that for them. For another, to overplay this legacy sequel as some kind of corrective would fundamentally contradict the ethos of a movie about the perils of living in the past. “The Naked Gun” doesn’t say we have to go back so much as it makes a case for steadying ourselves as the world lurches forward. 

Some things are too important to leave behind — like, for instance, the notion that stupidity can be a beautiful force for good, and not just an infinite fuel supply for evil. Like all truly great films (“Tokyo Story,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “Saving Silverman,” et al.), “The Naked Gun” was barely a minute old before it had me shaking my head and muttering “so dumb” to myself with a huge grin on my face. Some of the jokes fall flat of course, and several of the best ones from the trailers and TV spots aren’t in the 80-minute final cut at all (which, along with the glaring absence of Nordberg’s son, is enough to suggest the possibility of a “Wake Up, Ron Burgundy”-style alternate version), but the gags fly at you so fast that even the occasional whiff feels like a distant memory a few seconds after it lands. 

And while I wish the whole thing could have been even denser with throwaway sight gags and liminal ADR soundbites, Schaffer compensates for his relative inexperience with pure spoofs — which require a slightly different comic muscle than the one he worked on a more character-driven mockumentary like “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” — by ensuring that every comic setpiece is a total home run. One sees a riff on the series’ classic love montage spiral into “Too Many Cooks”-esque delirium. Another, equally magnificent sequence builds to a bit worthy of the Louvre as Frank tries to escape an electric car before it drives him into the ocean. The part with henchman Kevin Durand and the thermal goggles? It should be too familiar to crush like it does, but sometimes a good dog is all you need to breathe fresh life into a classic.

While it’s a mild shame “The Naked Gun” peters out a little bit toward the end (at least before rebounding during the credits), it’s even more of a shame that it has to end at all. Inviting people to laugh their heads off together in public is one of the greatest and most galvanizing things the movies have the power to do, and watching this one in a packed multiplex just a few days after sitting through “Happy Gilmore 2” in silence on the couch at home should be enough to convince anyone that it’s a crime for studios to let comedies go straight to streaming. Lucky for us, Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. is extremely on the case. 

Grade: B+

Paramount Pictures will release “The Naked Gun” in theaters on Friday, August 1

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