Liam Neeson's Naked Gun is one of the stupidest films I've ever seen. I loved it

Telegraph

30-07-2025

Since I can tell you in 20 words that the new Naked Gun film with Liam Neeson is so funny it made me physically crumple in my seat on multiple occasions, it's unclear what the rest of this review needs to actually do. But suffice it to say, if you appreciate the particular style of humour in which the spoof police comedy series specialised in the 1980s and 1990s – deadpan imbecility, surreal micro-interludes, innocent domestic activities resembling sex acts when viewed from a distance in silhouette, and so on – then chances are you, too, will find yourself cackling away on a slow yet steady slide towards the carpet.
Like Top Gun: Maverick or Star Wars: Episode VII, the new Naked Gun is another legacy sequel which exists purely to revive a winning formula the industry hasn't tried for a bit. It's not an especially daring production – while the script's long list of targets might encompass everything from bestiality to racist policing, it's content to tweak taboos rather than bust them – three things about it stun nonetheless.
One is how well-suited Neeson is to the part of poker-faced detective Frank Drebin Jr, the son of the character Leslie Nielsen played in the previous films. Like Nielsen, he delivers his dialogue with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds its lunacy. If the Taken star's past decade of throwaway action roles achieved nothing else, they at least equipped him with exactly the sort of no-nonsense screen persona required to sell some of the most unapologetically all-nonsense material to be seen since the early 1990s.
The plot, insofar as it matters (and it doesn't), loosely reworks the 1988 original for a modern audience. In a Los Angeles still pleasingly attuned to its noirish roots, Danny Huston's vaguely Musk-y electric car mogul is perfecting a mind-control gizmo known as the P.L.O.T. Device. An admirably age-appropriate femme fatale – winningly played by a game-for-anything Pamela Anderson – comes to Drebin with the intel that can eventually disarm it.
The second, more fundamental shock is the mere fact of the film's existence, almost a decade after Hollywood decided that mainstream comedies – sequels, reboots or otherwise – had become more trouble than they were probably worth. (Too little scope for franchise integration; too much for unforced PR nightmares, as social media scrutinises every pratfall for wrongthink.)
Presumably the Naked Gun brand still carried just enough weight to get this one made, though there are relatively few overt heritage callbacks, aside from a handful of sketch premises and the inevitable cameo by a certain taxidermied broad-tailed rodent.
The third surprise – perhaps the most surprising of all – is how uncannily director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers recapture the sheer comedic relentlessness of the original Naked Gun trilogy at their best, while maintaining an impressively high level of gag-by-gag quality control. (It's a pity that David Zucker, one third of the legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team behind the original films, has vowed not to watch this one, as he'd find nothing but the sincerest form of flattery here.)
With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you'd still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.
Some of the best jokes get temporarily lost inside themselves, such as the romantic alpine getaway interlude that plays like an extended standalone Neeson-Anderson skit, and in which the couple's easy on-screen chemistry – even amid some dazzlingly mad turns of events – will do little to quell the current talk of real-life romance. But many more inspired comic concepts are burned through in a flash, and are all the funnier for it. See it with an audience, and experience the rare and wonderful pleasure of a crowd scrambling to keep up with one of the stupidest films it's ever seen.