Review - The Naked Gun (2025)
Kidults Zone Editorial · about 5 hours ago
Liam Neeson cut loose, and It's exactly the medicine you need
Rating: 7/10
Director: Akiva Schaffer | Screenplay: Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, Akiva Schaffer | Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, Kevin Durand, CCH Pounder | Cinematography: Brandon Trost | Runtime: 85 min | Rated: PG-13
When I was a kid, the original Naked Gun movies were pure comfort. Instant laughter, every single time, no matter how many times I'd already seen them. So I went into this one with the specific nervousness you only get when someone reboots something you love.
And boy oh boy, it brought me right back.
Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr., son of the immortal Leslie Nielsen original, and the film is built on exactly the same principle the ZAZ team invented: put a completely serious actor in a completely stupid world and never let him acknowledge it. Akiva Schaffer, who came up through The Lonely Island, understands that formula better than most people working today.
Neeson is having the time of his life
I've loved Liam Neeson since he played Qui-Gon Jinn, and I've watched him spend the last fifteen years threatening people over the phone in various European cities. Watching him completely let loose here is refreshingly wild.
He plays it dead straight, which is the only way this works, but you can feel how much fun he's having underneath the deadpan. There's a looseness to him that I don't think I've seen before. The man has been carrying grim action thrillers for so long that watching him walk into a door frame with total conviction feels almost like a jailbreak.
Pamela Anderson matches him better than I expected, and her singing scene is genuinely bonkers. It's the kind of sequence that shouldn't work at all and somehow lands anyway, purely because everyone involved commits to it without blinking.
It's a slapstick parody, and that's the whole point
This is a gag-density movie. Jokes in the background, jokes in the signage, jokes running underneath dialogue that's already funny. Not all of them land, and they're not supposed to.
At 85 minutes it's in and out before it can wear out its welcome, which is the correct runtime for this kind of film and something modern comedies keep forgetting.
I can already see a pile of memes coming out of this thing, and honestly that's a compliment. That's how the originals lived on too.
The verdict
The Naked Gun is a great pick for a future movie night, and an even better pick right now while it's still in cinemas with a full room laughing around you. That matters with comedy more than any other genre.
If you're feeling down, or you just want to laugh your ass off for an hour and a half, go see it.
7/10