Director – Akiva Schaffer – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 85m
*****
Frank Drebin, the bumbling, self-confident, incompetent, cop and son of Frank Drebin, the bumbling, self-confident, incompetent cop sets out to solve a case involving a self-driving car and a P.L.O.T. Device – reboot of the classic comedy franchise is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st
Sequels and reboots are often questionable, and can so easily be made for all the wrong reasons. The Naked Gun franchise started out as the six-episode, L.A. police procedural TV series spoof Police Squad! (1982) which spawned three features under The Naked Gun moniker (1988, 1991, 1994). The TV series is both extremely funny and groundbreaking in its use of the format. The three movies cleverly translated the humour to the big screen, and had the good sense to quit while still ahead. Both the TV series and the movies were well received at the time and are fondly remembered today.
The humour derives from a combination of ridiculous gags and non-comedy actors playing it straight. At the centre of the franchise was Lt. Frank Drebin, who despite a general cluelessness possesses a determination to follow through that means he always gets his man. To make this work, the creative / writing team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker (ZAZ) cast actor Leslie Nielsen in the role. Nielsen had had a remarkable career in television and movies since 1950, playing in numerous US TV series for one or occasionally two episodes and a number of movies, among them Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982); The Poseidon Adventure, (Ronald Neame, 1972); Forbidden Planet, (Fred Wilcox, 1954). Until he worked with ZAZ on Airplane! (1980), he hadn’t done comedy. For Police Squad! and The Naked Gun films, he played Drebin straight. The character is ridiculous, but because he believes in himself and his potential for good, even if he’s actually a walking disaster area, the original show and the films that followed are very, very funny.
What The Naked Gun (2025) likewise understands, on the most fundamental level, is that Drebin should not be played by a comic actor, but by a straight man. The question then is, which non-comic actor should play him? Producer Seth MacFarlane, working with Liam Neeson on the comedy-Western A Million Ways to Die in the West (2013), suddenly saw the the potential of Neeson, who possessed the ability to deliver ridiculous lines as if he completely believed them, to achieve something similar to Nielsen in a ZAZ-type comedy. It all came together when he met Saturday Night Live alumnus and director Akiva Schaffer, who seemed to be on the franchise’s wavelength. Schaffer hired writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, who turned Neeson’s Drebin into Frank Drebin, Junior. So the new movie isn’t exactly a reboot: it’s about the son of the original character. This leads to a great gag where it turns out that almost every officer on Police Squad! is the son or daughter of one of the original characters, and they all (simultaneously and individually) ask their parent – whose portrait(s) hang on the Police Squad! Wall (at least for the duration of this gag) – for advice on their current cases.
The plot on these films doesn’t matter as long as it’s conceived tightly enough for the audience to buy it, because the real job at hand is the succession of rapid-fire gags of various different types. Two or three decades on from the final Naked Gun film, the movies have changed. In fact, they changed pretty radically towards the end of the three Naked Gun movies with Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) which via its ultra-realistic, largely computer-generated dinosaurs proved that just about anything could be believably brought to the screen, changing the medium of cinema for ever. Where the earlier films and the series traded on essentially a back projection gag – repeated towards the end of the new film – where a camera fixed to a police car roof watching a siren light rotate as, on the background plate behind it, all manner of (real life / photographically unfeasible) events play out, the new one can do things like ensure that every couple of minutes or so, a fresh cup of coffee is put into Neeson’s hand. Some of this makes rational sense (he walks into the Police Squad! station offices and is handed a cup of coffee) while some of it elicits laughter by plunging us into a sense of the absurd (as Frank drives around or is involved in a car chase, cups of coffee are handed to him when in real life they just couldn’t be).
The plot is propelled by deranged, Elon Musk-type super-rich businessman villain Richard Cane (a suitably arrogant Danny Huston) who among other things builds and sells his own brand of self-driving cars, in one of which one of his employees is killed, and another of which is gifted to Frank who is leading the murder investigation (until his chief, played by veteran actress CCH Pounder, pulls him off the case). With the hubris of a Bond villain, if lacking the competence (which is part of the film’s charm and appeal), Cane has plans to ultimately wipe out most of the human race with a few exceptions (he himself is one of them, naturally) so that the few survivors can start again with the Earth as a whole new Eden. He may lack a villain’s competence, but what he does have is a clever little gadget called a P.L.O.T. Device which will enable him to carry out his dastardly plan.
Also on hand as femme fatale Beth Davenport is Pamela Anderson (The Last Showgirl, Gia Coppola, 2024; Baywatch TV series 1992-7) who, like Neeson, is playing the character straight. One of her best scenes with Neeson occurs when she goes round to his apartment for a meal, and is so disgusted by the state of his kitchen oven that she gives it a clean. Drebin’s faithful pet dog is also in the room. They are being observed at a distance by a villain, from whose angle their utterly innocent activities hilariously read as a series of physical, sexual encounters, including the dog. And another sequence involves a romantic weekend away at a lodge in the snow, where the couple build a snowman which first joins them for a threesome and subsequently turns murderous, as if the hackneyed plot of some third-rate, crime thriller B-movie had been compressed into a five-minute scene.
In the end, this Naked Gun reboot might have been terrible, yet because its makers have found good reasons to make the film and honed the right script and cast, it works. Effectively, all this film ever needed to do was to repeat the playing it straight silliness of the previous movies and Police Squad! TV series. And that is EXACTLY what it does. In spades.
Your scribe has enormous respect for movies like this. Comedy is, in his opinion, the hardest film genre to pull off effectively. Any comedy that can genuinely make him laugh, and laugh consistently throughout, gets full marks. The Naked Gun runs for under 90 minutes, and during that time I (and the audience with whom I saw it) were in continuous fits of laughter. It succeeds admirably in its modest aims, and proves the perfect vehicle both for old viewers to reacquaint themselves with the franchise and for newcomers to experience the phenomenon that is The Naked Gun for the very first time
The Naked Gun is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 1st.
Trailer: