LA Police Squad scion Frank Drebin Jnr takes on an evil tech billionaire and falls in love with the sister of a murder victim.
While my friends and I watched this new Naked Gun in a haze of nostalgic goodwill, I can’t see how those generations born since the original movies won’t adore it too. It has an age appropriate relationship at its centre, and a magical owl, the two things Gen Z and Millennials respectively have long been obsessed with.
This legacy policequel (sorry) does what the best spoof comedies do: treading that fine line between pure genius and stunning stupidity, the movie equivalent of Albert Einstein winning a farting competition. At only 85 minutes it’s an almost too-short movie (not a sentence I ever thought I’d type). And while there is a plot it is cartoonishly basic, and hastily paused whenever a word or sight gag, pratfall or parody hovers into view.
With its floundering hero and much cleverer love interest it’s an homage to the fondly-remembered previous films and the early-80s Police Squad! TV series; while Liam Neeson’s gravelly voiceover adds a more noirish hat-tip than before to the police procedurals on which the whole franchise was based.
Richard Cane is the familiar-sounding entrepreneur founder of Edentech, the maker of electric and driverless cars. Cane’s evil plan is to release a virus into the population via a gizmo called a P.L.O.T. Device, which is spread by smartphones and turns ordinary people into angry, fighting brutes. So Twitter but without actually needing to tweet.
Once the general populace is busy battering each other, Cane (Danny Huston, like all the best villains both evil and whiny) and his friends will retire to one of his mega bunkers until it’s all over. Then they plan to return to a new world, but built like the old world he misses, where men were men.
Unfortunately for Cane, in his way is Frank Drebin Jnr (Neeson), sorry-looking scion of the Drebin policing dynasty. He too misses the old world, when he could coerce a confession out of a guilty-as-hell suspect or shoot a load of bank robbers without being suspended; but mainly because he misses his dead father.
The film itself has quite a bit to say about the past, and how we should view it. Its villain, despite being an identifiably 21st century capitalist, wants to recreate what he considers the past to have been. Meanwhile the movie shows us that the more things change the more they stay the same: Frank Jnr is as inept and chaos ridden as his father was. While this update notes the changes in the real world since then, the first three films weren’t punching down as much as punching everyone, including Drebin, for a laugh; a tradition this new film admirably continues.
When you’ve missed the Hogwarts Express and you’ve got to teach a potions class in an hour
Thanks to Frank Jnr’s antics, LAPD’s Police Squad exists under the constant threat of closure. Despite this he and his colleague Ed Hocken Jnr (Paul Walter Hauser) plod on, this time investigating two cases that turn out to be linked: that bank hold-up, where it turns out none of the would-be robbers knew each other, and the apparent suicide of IT specialist Mark Davenport, whose sister Beth (a hilarious and luminous Pamela Anderson) is from the beginning convinced he has been murdered. A writer of true crime fiction, Beth is instantly on the tail of both Cane and Frank, determined to find out what happened.
Anderson is a hoot, and delivers a standout turn as a bibbly bobbly (or was it bibbity bobbity, or possibly even bam bam bilbilly) jazz scat singer desperately holding the attention of Cane while Frank “investigates” round the back of Cane’s club. Neeson has the permanently downcast expression of, well Liam Neeson. It’s phenomenal casting on both counts, and even better that Neeson’s Frank (inept and depressed) is not the same as Nielsen’s Frank (inept and genial).
The joke hit rate is incredibly high, and it’s almost impossible to have a favourite gag as they come at you too fast. I will say though that if Drebins Jnr and Snr each held a gun to my head, just before they accidentally shot each other I’d happily respond with: Frank working out who the bartender’s brother is; the heatseeking binoculars scene; the winter lodge montage which includes a threesome with a snowman; and, my favourite favourite, the replacement windscreen.
I only took that half star off for the American sports gags where we Brits just sat there, silently, though to be fair it gave me time to draw a breath. (It’s okay, I have at least googled Spirit Halloween now.) Luckily the language of farts, like the language of love for Pamela Anderson, is a universal one.
The team behind the original Naked Gun movies – brothers Jerry and David Zucker and the late Jim Abrahams – also made ’70s aviation disaster spoof Airplane. In that film they deliberately went with actors known for straight dramatic roles who then deadpanned their way through the movie as chaos erupted around them. While 2025 Naked Gun is produced by a new team (and David Zucker, who directed the very first film, has said he won’t watch it) it remains entirely true to the spirit of the original, with the same attitude to casting. Neeson brings doleful gravitas to his deadpanning and faceplanting, while Huston expertly skirts being a joke villain even though Cane is, in his own way, as inept as Frank.
I’ve just bought it on digital for a rewatch, and will probably discover a thousand more jokes I missed at the cinema. Who knows, I may even read up on American sports teams and MMA commentators first.
Note: There is an end-credits scene… at the very end, featuring Weird Al Yankovic
Missed anything? Read my plot recap article: The Naked Gun – want to know what happened? Please, take a seat
Watch the official Naked Gun trailer here: