‘The Naked Gun' review: Liam Neeson brings a ‘Taken'-or-leave-it air to a rougher reboot
But there's a 'but' here — a gradually dispiriting air, with director Akiva Schaffer hunting for the proper tone, starting with his script co-written by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Some of that relates to the casting. Liam Neeson works as a Drebin for a new, coarser, meaner age, and he has no problem suggesting a surly, disgruntled son of the cop immortalized by Leslie Nielsen in the short-lived 1982 TV series 'Police Squad!' and three lucrative big-screen chapters.
Undeniably, given the rampant speculation of their off-screen lives, it's nice to see Neeson share the frame with Pamela Anderson, who plays a femme fatale of a crime novelist. Her character, Pamela Davenport, is putting the smush on Drebin to solve the case of her late brother, who holds the key to the plot for which no one on Earth would be dumb enough to prioritize when going to a 'Naked Gun' reboot.
Simple enough premise. But there's more, and too much of it, given the percentage of this film's 85 minutes handed over without a fight to Danny Huston as an Elon Muskian tech entrepreneur intent on taking over the world. This is a comedy misjudgment, and while it's just my suspicion, the overload of apocalyptic and vaguely science-fiction-y stuff, and the movie's reliance on lazy, hyperviolent action tropes, may have something to do with the presence of Seth MacFarlane as producer of 'The Naked Gun.' The genre spoofing plays too often like mere mimicry without much wit.
Director Schaffer of the comedy group Lonely Island and the very funny mockumentary 'Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping' seems slightly at sea at the helm of this project. Certainly he's savvy enough to realize, based on some of the set-ups and banter here, that finding the right way, comically, to deal with a legendarily inept emblem of largely accidental law enforcement was crucial.
Results: mixed. Line to line, the best bits score, and Neeson — when he's not mired in incontinence jokes, enough for a movie titled 'Incontinence!' — has a good sparring partner in Paul Walter Hauser, as the son of George Kennedy's character. But the undercurrents are sour and conflicted, with some racial optics more suspect than the narrative's actual suspects. Why set up an Officer Nordberg Jr. character with a great jab at O.J. Simpson and then write him out of the rest of the movie?
There's one joke in particular that captures the wildly up-and-down intentions of a 2025-era 'Naked Gun,' having to do with how many white bad guys Neeson's Drebin Jr. has taken down over the years, in relation to perps of color. It gets a big laugh, even while it admits the difficulty of finding the comic charm in Drebin in a post-George Floyd world.
You may ask: Why analyze the implications of a joke-book movie just out for some fun? Well, because I wanted some fun myself. I got some. In the end, though, this 'Naked Gun' has little interest or temperamental skill in the art of the deadpan throwaway, which was the crucial element in 'Police Squad!' and, intermittently, in the three movies. Neeson's surly, simmering kettle-of-violence aura throws things off a bit. Leslie Nielsen only comes around once. But the two actors who've taken on Drebin in two separate eras do not seem related at all.
'The Naked Gun' — 2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for crude/sexual material, violence/bloody images, and brief partial nudity)
Running time: 1:25
How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 31
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