Forgive me for saying this, but Liam Neeson has been in a few very silly movies. I refer not to the actual comedies he’s popped up in but to the legion of action films he’s churned out nonstop over the past 20 years—each seemingly more perfunctory and high-concept than the last. The actor has growled melodramatic lines, brandished a gun, and dealt with assorted faceless bad guys in an airplane and in an ice-road truck, and even while trapped inside a parked car. His on-screen tough-guy persona is so ubiquitous and over-the-top that in the new comedy The Naked Gun, it barely requires any calibration to be funny.
The original Naked Gun films, as well as the TV show, Police Squad!, that inspired them, were rooted in the same comedic spin. They starred Leslie Nielsen, who was known as a dramatic actor before his turn in the film Airplane! established him as a master of spoof comedy. Nielsen played the bumbling LAPD lieutenant Frank Drebin with sincerity, making the absurdity around him all the funnier. Neeson makes sense as Nielsen’s successor: the stone-faced hero squinting at the silliest stuff imaginable.
The goofiness of 2025’s The Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer, is especially enjoyable in the current cinematic landscape. Amid the typical clamor of summer blockbusters, an out-and-out farce is like an oasis in the desert. Comedies used to be a major part of the moviegoing world, and I continue to be baffled that films filled with ridiculous gags and one-liners are almost impossible to find in theaters these days. Laughing along with a crowd is a beautiful, irreproducible experience, yet Hollywood seems to have shifted its priorities toward pumping out action-adventure movies—a genre hardly known for its humor.
Although not quite as transcendent as its forebears, the new Naked Gun manages to provide the inane fun I’ve been missing. The action-inflected comedy keeps the ensemble tight: Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr.—a macho, trigger-happy presence on the force who’s never without a cup of coffee. (An off-screen figure even passes one to him through his car window while he’s driving on the freeway.) The supporting cast includes the well-meaning Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (played by an affably dim Paul Walter Hauser), the grumpy Chief Davis (CCH Pounder), and a femme-fatale type named Beth (Pamela Anderson), who enters Drebin’s world to request that he investigate her brother’s death.
The movie judders from one set piece to another with only a loose plot to follow—the story involves some dead bodies, an evil billionaire (Danny Huston), and a budding romance between Drebin and Beth. Everyone plays it reliably straight, a contrast that helps the film maintain its zany energy—and, in the spirit of the original trilogy, maximize the number of jokes per minute. If one bit flops, another arrives in a few seconds to make up for it.
The Naked Gun’s commitment to that airy sense of pointlessness is refreshing. Schaffer’s most notable long-form work to date is probably Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a scrappy collaboration with his friends and former Saturday Night Live collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, a.k.a. the Lonely Island; the movie skewered music biopics with cheerful, vulgar aplomb. Popstar was largely ignored by most theatergoers, but it became a near-instant cult classic among comedy diehards. Now Schaffer is trying to sneak the same high-grade, unadulterated fun into a major motion picture, with a steely Neeson as its guise. By attaching his farce to the face of some of Hollywood’s biggest action movies, the director is gambling that it will draw a wider audience.
The world needs more comedies, and the sillier the better. The Naked Gun is happy to deliver plenty of chortles, along with some wild swings that are just slapsticky enough to work. (A sequence featuring a sentient snowman defies easy description.) I’m rooting for its success in the hope that it brings some genre diversity to the silver screen—not just action movies with jokes, but action movies that are a joke.
