Liam Neeson takes aim at his rote thriller roles in the giddy, riotous 'The Naked Gun'

Los Angeles Times

31-07-2025

'The Naked Gun' is Liam Neeson's best career move since 'Schindler's List.' That 1993 Oscar-nominated performance put the Irish thespian on the A-list. His later pivot to the 2009 action-thriller 'Taken,' where he rescued his teen daughter from smugglers, crowned Neeson the King of the B's. Ever since, he's been skidding down the alphabet, saving even more daughters, wives, girlfriends, sons, grandsons and other people's families, as well as a train, a mine, a battleship, an airplane and a pub. Meanwhile, his own reputation has been slowly tortured to death.
But comedy is reinvigorating. Especially a tough guy comedy that lets Neeson mock his lousy taste in roles. Directed by Akiva Schaffer, 'The Naked Gun' careens around, merrily smashing into things like a custom-engineered Liam Neeson vehicle. His rightness for the role is a marvelous coup, considering it's the fourth film in a four-decade-old franchise that's tightly bonded to another once-distinguished dramatic actor, Leslie Nielsen, who originated the character of Lt. Frank Drebin in the 1982 TV sitcom 'Police Squad!' and then shouldered it through three feature films. At Nielsen's funeral, the pallbearers carried his coffin to the 'Naked Gun' theme. His tombstone inscription is a fart joke.
Neeson plays Frank's son, Frank Drebin Jr., who inherited his dad's job as a cocksure Los Angeles cop. Who is his mother? No clue. Schaffer, who wrote the script with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, has correctly concluded that taking this premise seriously would insult our intelligence. This younger Drebin has mommy issues (he was breastfed until middle school) and wifey issues (he's a standard-issue widower). His father functions more like a guardian-angel-slash-gantlet. (Silver fox fun fact: Neeson is eleven years older than Nielsen was when he took on the role.)
'I want to be just like you, but at the same time completely different and original,' Neeson's Drebin prays before his dead pop's altar. Kneeling next to him at police headquarters, his colleagues Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) and Not Nordberg Jr.'s (Moses Jones) own predecessors, George Kennedy and O.J. Simpson. The latter eulogy receives all the reverence it's earned.
That prayer for blessing, is, of course, Schaffer's, who seems to have to have studied the curveball punch lines of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — a.k.a. ZAZ, who broke into the mainstream with 'Airplane!' — as though each laugh was calculated by Archimedes. His sequel hits every touchstone in the terrific first movie: the opening melee, the motorized mayhem, the tech-glitch toilet humor, the climactic sporting event and the femme fatale Frank falls for in a loony love montage. (This one is Beth, played by Pamela Anderson.) It's even plotted cameos for Priscilla Presley and her stuffed beaver. Yet, each callback has been costumed enough not to feel like a parody of a parody. They're more like trusty gags that sidle in wearing Groucho Marx glasses.
A good comedy like this one is hard to review. The English language doesn't have many natural ways to call something hilarious. ('Mirthful?' 'Jocular?' Only if I'm playing Scrabble.) Illustrating its skill with examples gives away the jokes, which is criminal when its humor hinges on visual and linguistic double-takes, as well as escalating pratfalls that, in the original, went on for half a dozen beats. (Schaffer stops at three or four.)
The verbal wordplay runs all the way through the end credits that boast a set dresser, a set bureau and a set chiffarobe. But it starts with the star. Liam Neeson wasn't hired solely because his name sounds like saying 'Leslie Nielsen' with a mouth full of banana, but the similarity had to have gotten a giggle in the casting room.
Here, he's added extra gravel to his voice. Neeson gets a chuckle just growling the word 'mittens.' Us film fans have stared at his hawkish mug for eons, but I can't remember ever before seeing him flash a huge, daffy grin. He can't look like he's having too much fun. The first rule of ZAZ-style comedy is that you can't ever appear like you're in on the joke, which Anderson edges close to once when she breaks into a scatting jazz number. That scene is salvaged by the rapt expression on Danny Huston's face. His bad guy, an evil billionaire named Richard Cane, genuinely loves it. Otherwise, Anderson holds her own, cooing her one-liners with the kittenish candor of Marilyn Monroe.
The key idea remains that the 'Naked Gun' directs non-comedians to deliver their lines seriously. When the chief (CCH Pounder) commands Frank to switch on his body camera, he huffs, 'Since when do cops have to follow this law?' The audience can decide where that zinger lands on the spectrum between sincere and sarcastic.
But humor has changed since the '80s. Heck, it's evolved since the early aughts, the last era where mainstream blockbusters thought prison rape quips were a riot. Richard wants to rewind the culture back to pre-woke times. Like today's hip primitives who espouse paleo diets, he wants to make mankind Neanderthal again. Which, according to his logic, should ally our villain with our hero, as Frank also froze his tastes at the turn of the millennium. (Although Frank is mostly passionate about stockpiling old episodes of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' on his TiVo.)
When Frank needles an ice-blond goon (Kevin Durand) that they're going to 'love you in San Quentin,' there's a near-audible sigh — must we rewind here? — before Schaffer spins the joke in a radically different direction. His 'Naked Gun' doesn't want to regress; it wants to surprise and surpass while never punching down. The film is so committed to its PG-13 rating that it manages to pull off some truly filthy, bawdy slapstick without exposing a frame of skin. The gigantic brawl at the end gets creative with its nonlethal violence, sending Neeson skidding between the legs of a line of opponents like he's in a Busby Berkeley musical, whacking each guy in the groin.
The cinematography tries too hard to capture melodramatic modern police procedurals with their choking clouds of haze. But the film noir lighting on Anderson's eyes is spot-on, as are two sight gags that are built around the set's extreme shadows.
Four films in, there are now as many 'Naked Gun' features as there were live-aired episodes of 'Police Squad!' before the network gave it the ax. 'The television screen is too small,' Leslie Nielsen explained. In sitcom form, the adventures of Lt. Frank Drebin crowded in more jokes than the at-home audience could absorb. Yet in public, he beamed, 'that movie screen can fall on you and you're not going to miss it.'
Yet today, grand format farces like this one are seen as a risky financial bet. To cut down on costs, this 'Naked Gun' shot some of its Los Angeles scenes in Atlanta, and as a pointed industry in-joke, inserts views of downtown L.A. that become increasingly unrecognizable and absurd. Appropriately, some screenings begin with Neeson's taped PSA in support of big screen burlesque. 'Saving comedy is no laughing matter,' he soberly insists. Neeson has saved everything else. Let him rescue this genre too.