Reboot The Naked Gun? Surely they can’t be serious?
Inheritance can be a tricky thing, for comedic legacy sequels even more so. In the case of The Naked Gun, it appears that talent hasn’t skipped a generation as Liam Neeson, while no Leslie Nielsen, is decent value as Frank Drebin Jr as he tackles the criminals and low lives of twenty-first century LA with all the sophistication and sagacity of his legendary father.
After foiling a bank robbery (yes, the one you’ve seen in the trailer), using some unorthodox methods, Frank Drebin Jr (Neeson) is relieved of the case and assigned a dead-end car crash to investigate. But when the deceased driver’s sister Beth (Pamela Anderson) turns up at the station insisting her brother was murdered, the trail leads to celebrated tech-billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston).
Attempting to resurrect the rapid-fire gagfest comedy of Zucker Abrams Zucker isn’t easy – as numerous spoofs have shown – and shouldn’t be attempted lightly. Most films that try it tend to go with the spray and pray approach, hoping that at least some of the jokes will hit their target. The Naked Gun takes pains to cram its almost ninety minutes with as many jokes as it can, but it’s still hit and miss. Not so much in whether or not the jokes are funny (most of them are), but in which flavour comedy they are. There are plenty of ZAZ-style visual gags and razor-sharp verbal absurdities but every so often, the rapid-fire lunacy finds itself elbowed aside by Family Guy style Gish gallop instead – silly or extended ‘bits’ that don’t land at all, including an extended whine about Buffy The Vampire Slayer that might have been funny in Peter Griffin’s voice but isn’t something Neeson can work with. There are, at least, plenty of good gags that aren’t in the trailer but even the good ones are occasionally compromised by producer Seth MacFarlane’s inability to resist double dipping on the same gag, although the running gag involving cups of coffee that quickly goes stale ends up becoming funny again through the sheer commitment to it.
Neeson and Anderson suck up most of the on-screen oxygen, leaving little for the supporting cast – especially the criminally underused (for the second time this summer) Paul Walter Hauser whose Ed Jr deserved more to do and the likes of CCH Pounder and Kevin Durand who basically stand on the sidelines of a script that seeks to honour the original movie with a wholesale reprisal of the plot of Kingsman: The Secret Service. However, where the original Naked Gun movie benefitted from the suave gravitas and exquisite comic timing of Ricardo Montalban, 2025’s The Naked Gun has Danny Huston, who’s adequately suave I guess and certainly has gravitas but, well, two out of three ain’t bad, right? Huston has less than zero comic chops, the uncanny ability to suck the funny right out of a line reading or scene and is woefully miscast, at times cringe-inducingly so, hurting the film much more than the slightly curdled blending of different comedy styles.
Better than we could have hoped for, yet not as good as we might have wanted, The Naked Gun sees the franchise in good hands and pretty rude health, but there’s no escaping the fact it runs out of steam before it runs out of screentime and if nothing else it should result in a restraining order that keeps Danny Huston at least a hundred yards from anything even vaguely attempting comedy from now on.
