Manslaughter mispronounced as “man’s laughter” – by a cop! I laughed, so shoot me with a service pistol. The Naked Gun, back after nearly 30 years and with Liam Neeson now playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the cop originally played by Leslie Nielsen, is funny. Not, perhaps, as funny as the original, but it made me chortle a few times, groan quite a few more, plus there was a reference to that beaver joke originally cranked out by Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in one of the earlier films. Can any more be necessary?
A plot, for instance? No, it’s entirely unnecessary, and the writers – Akiva Schaffer (who directs), Doug Mand and Dan Gregor – say as much in the film’s opening moments, when a technological gizmo called a Primordial Law of Toughness Device (P.L.O.T. Device) is stolen from a bank vault. In the wrong hands the device will scramble people’s brains, or something, and cause humanity to revert to savagery and destroy itself while the bad guys hide out in safety in a bunker, Dr Strangelove style. Drebin’s task is to stop that happening.
Pamela Anderson plays the Priscilla Presley to Neeson’s Drebin this time around. “She was beautiful,” Drebin says in gravelly crime-thriller voiceover. “She had a body that carried her head around and a butt that seemed to say: Hello, I’m a talking butt.” Again: I laughed.
Schaffer, Mand and Gregor have obviously sat down with the original movies, the Police Squad! series that spawned them and other work by writer/directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (most obviously The Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane!) and not just absorbed their sense of pace and style of characterisation but also their mission to come at comedy from every direction. There are visual gags, wordplay, stuff going on in the background you might miss first time around, absurd situations, jokes about genre, jokes that are culturally ridiculous, or physically impossible, but most of all the jokes are about getting hold of the wrong end of the stick – like the shadowplay joke where Beth (Anderson) appears to be fellating Drebin, stolen from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, though Mike Myers stole it from Carry On Camping.
“Cigar?” says chief bad guy Richard Cane (Danny Huston), offering one to Drebin. “Yes, it is,” Drebin replies. “May I speak freely?” Cane later asks Beth. “I’d prefer English,” she replies. There is a lot of this, a lot.
In what looks like it might be an engagement with the real world, Huston’s Richard Cane is the mad megalomaniacal owner of a company that produces electric cars. In case the name Elon Musk starts to form in the viewer’s mind, the cars themselves are Hyundais, so someone in legal clearly had their way.
She is a game bird, Anderson, as adept at the comedy stoneface as Neeson. Leslie Nielsen’s sense of Drebin as a man who might be fumbling towards some sense of his own stupidity – the strained face, the cocked eyebrow – eludes him, however.
And eventually, unlike the original Gun movies, this one has moments where it wants to become a proper crime thriller. Frank demonstrates periodic bursts of intelligence. And then quickly tries to atone for all that by majestically shifting the plot into total absurdity. Drebin’s father reincarnated as a giant owl? It did not make me laugh but it is amusing all the same.
I doubt there will be a sequel. Schaffer, Mand and Gregor set us up for one, while Neeson himself in interviews has described the film as a “one-off”. So his gravelly singing over the end credits, in mock romantic Charles Aznavour style, is probably the last we’ll hear from Frank Drebin Jr. That might be a good thing. End on a high.
The Naked Gun – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
