‘The Naked Gun’ Gives Liam Neeson a Whole New Set of Skills
There are only two questions to consider while watching director Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of The Naked Gun. First, is Liam Neeson, playing the son of bumbling L.A. detective Frank Drebin, as funny as the late Leslie Nielsen was in the original trilogy? Second, is the film making us laugh? To answer those questions, Neeson is good enough, and the film makes us laugh…a lot.
With his name recognition, action movie credentials and humorless persona (save this classic bit from Ricky Gervais’ Life’s Too Short) Neeson seems to be the perfect choice to step into Nielsen’s clown shoes. On screen, he’s a little less than perfect: His gruff line readings often slip into parody, working against a style of humor that’s best when the actor doesn’t know they’re in a comedy. But he’ll do anything for a laugh, even if he lacks Nielsen’s charming air of deadpan befuddlement.
The biggest compliment one can give Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand’s script is that many of the jokes would fit perfectly in any of the three previous Naked Gun films, as well as their hilarious and short-lived TV predecessor, 1982’s Police Squad! There’s a prodigious amount of inspired stupidity in its scant 85 minutes (which smartly matches the runtimes of the other films), including a couple of gut-bustingly funny extended gags. It’s enough to proclaim The Naked Gun one of the funniest films of 2025 so far, although it must be noted that Schaffer’s version lacks the sense of anarchy and sheer number of random visual gags in the previous films. The original team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (collectively known as ZAZ) packed these with so much humor that first you’d sit up in your seat in anticipation of an incoming joke, then you’d laugh when the joke arrived, then you’d chuckle at a smaller gag that came in from the side. Schaffer’s film is too high gloss for that level of insanity. But it’s still a very funny collection of on-target jokes that honors and updates the style of the ZAZ originals.
