It is both alarming and vaguely comforting to realize that it has been over thirty years since The Naked Gun last graced movie screens, thirty years since Leslie Nielsen, that silver-haired apostle of deadpan, taught us that the punchline is funnier when you deliver it as if you’re reading a grocery list of cream of wheat, prune juice, and canned peas. In those three decades, parody as a genre suffered a slow, undignified death; somewhere between Scary Movie 5 and Epic Movie, when studios decided that comedy was simply a matter of cramming celebrity lookalikes, fart jokes, and 2000s tabloid headlines into a NutriBullet and hoping the resulting sludge passed for humor.
By the late 2000s, America had traded the cartoonish lunacy of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker for the semi-autobiographical ramblings of Judd Apatow and his stable of shaggy-man-children. The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up gave audiences comedy that was grounded, awkwardly heartfelt, and at least 45 minutes longer than it needed to be. The next generation of hits, from The Hangover to Bridesmaids, retained flashes of slapstick chaos, but they never leaned into the art of total absurdity, the kind that could turn a police briefing into an orchestral performance of flatulence, or a funeral into a carnival of pratfalls.
Parody, we all assumed, was dead.
But comedy, like dark blue jorts and political scandal, is cyclical. In 2025, The Naked Gun has been miraculously resuscitated by director Akiva Schaffer, of Lonely Island, Hot Rod, and Popstar fame, and thus no stranger to both irony and commitment to the bit; and producer Seth MacFarlane, a man who has never met a joke he didn’t beat to death with a giant rubber chicken and then lovingly revive for an encore.
In what may be the most inspired bit of casting-against-type since Liam Neeson tried romantic comedy (Love Actually, remember?), Neeson himself steps into the trench coat as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., son of Nielsen’s legendary buffoon. Neeson, known primarily for rescuing kidnapped daughters and punching wolves in the snow, delivers his lines with the same unflappable sincerity that once made Nielsen king. Paul Walter Hauser plays Cpt. Ed Hocken Jr., while Pamela Anderson, yes, that Pamela Anderson, waltzes away with the entire film as Beth, a performance so sharp, so self-aware, and so deliriously funny that it demands serious awards consideration (phrases never before typed about Anderson in human history).
The movie wastes no time announcing its anarchic intentions. Its opening is a pitch-perfect heist set piece that begins like The Dark Knight, masked robbers, ominous music, the whole thing, until a little girl walks in, rips off her face Mission: Impossible-style, and reveals herself to be Liam Neeson. From there, the movie rarely stops firing. There are at least three laughs every ten seconds, a feat not accomplished since the Barbara Bush administration, who, we can all agree, was a perfect specimen of manhood.
The jokes themselves are both new and gloriously retro. There are throwaway giggles (“Oh, you went to UCLA? I see L.A. all the time from my apartment window”) and five-minute absurdist set pieces, including a snowman montage that skewers every cinematic genre imaginable. The movie even manages an Austin Powers-esque physical gag involving Neeson, Anderson, and a dog preparing a Thanksgiving turkey, proof that, in the right hands, total nonsense can still be art.
There are, naturally, a few misfires. The filmmakers tease a Nordberg Jr. (O.J. Simpson’s original character) only in a sly gag involving a Wall of Heroes; an officer looks at Simpson’s picture, shakes his head, and walks off. It’s funny, but it leaves you wanting more. And, unforgivably, the film skips the iconic police-siren-opening credits, a decision that feels like editing Star Wars without the golden crawl.
Yet these are quibbles. The movie knows exactly what it is: a love letter to a kind of comedy so out of vogue that even referencing TiVo feels fresh again. Schaffer and MacFarlane pay homage to the Zucker brothers while injecting a few 2025 sensibilities; there’s a Buffy the Vampire Slayer monologue, a sprinkling of meta-commentary, and a perfectly stupid running gag about drinking coffee.
More importantly, the cast commits. Neeson, of all people, sells the absurdity with such conviction that you almost forget he once killed a man with a broken lightbulb. Anderson, meanwhile, is a revelation, channeling both Nielsen and Priscilla Presley with uncanny precision while adding her own sly wink to the camera.
The result? The funniest film since “Netflix and chill” was still edgy. Perhaps it’s time to update the phrase: The Naked Gun and fuck. Because that’s what the movie does, it takes the lid off the comedy bag and lets every kind of joke fly: slapstick, wordplay, visual gags, meta-humor, and just plain stupidity. And it all works.
Welcome back, slapstick. We missed you more than we knew.
