Sometimes movies are the best place for a TV show. Star Trek only lasted three seasons but spawned a massively successful series of films that earned it multiple TV spinoffs. Cop show pastiche Police Squad! got canceled after six episodes but had ’em rolling in the aisles as The Naked Gun flicks.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Seth MacFarlane has been involved in the best imaginable recent revamps of both. True, the Family Guy creator repurposed his rejected Trek pitch as The Orville, but he’s more honest about his love for the brilliantly silly adventures of Lt. Frank Drebin with The Naked Gun, the legacy sequel to the show and the resultant trilogy of cinematic comedies.
MacFarlane may have ended up as producer rather than writer or director, but it was his idea to bring in Liam Neeson as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen’s character from the originals. It was also his idea to keep it what it was – an earnest yet idiotic spoof of old school detective shows of the kind no one makes anymore.
It’s an unlikely but welcome change of pace for Neeson, who seems to have run his stone-faced post-Taken persona into the ground. He tried real acting again with last year’s mournful In the Land of Saints and Sinners and, having proved his worth as a comedic heavy in several MacFarlane projects, now he’s front and center taking the pratfalls. His Drebin Jr. is both a clear homage to Nielsen as daddy dearest with all the family obliviousness mixed with a spoof of his own action chops. Most importantly, he’s not afraid to make himself look like an absolute idiot, which is the heart of The Naked Gun franchise. As defined by Police Squad! creators Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker, much of the comedy comes from one of two formulas: either from having one total moron paired with a counterpart who is lightly befuddled by their antics, or having everyone play a ludicrous scene completely straight. Neeson plays everything so absurdly straight that it loops back around to be hilarious, whether he’s accidentally pantsing himself in front of a crowd or getting into a fight with a snowman.
Having a dramatic actor goof around was always a key to these films, as is assembling an excellent ensemble. Fans of the originals will get a good cackle from Paul Walter Hauser playing the son of another legacy character, George Kennedy’s Capt. Ed Hocken Jr., and from CCH Pounder perfectly deadpanning as Drebin’s exasperated boss. Meanwhile Pamela Anderson in particular delivers some of the best zingers as Beth, the sister of a dead scientist who becomes Drebin’s love interest. She does, not the corpse. Just clarifying. After all, this is a Naked Gun film, so anything for a laugh.
Of course, every file pulled from the desks of Police Squad needs a criminal mastermind. Much like conservatives whined about the Lex Luthor of this summer’s other wonderfully earnest and heartfelt throwback, Superman, being oligarch-bullying, so some real-life business people may see themselves in Danny Huston’s apocalyptically-minded technovillain – to which the only possible response is, well, that really seems like a “you” problem. The Naked Gun may always take aim at the Keystone aspects of the cops, but vainglorious villains are their stock-in-trade.
This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion. It’s everything Schaffer and Gregor failed to do with their too-knowing Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, which tripped over its own meta conceits. Here, they just concentrate on hyperdense joke delivery. And that density isn’t about hoping one hits even if five fail, but in flipping between dick punches and witty wordplay, rambling running gags with no payoff and brilliant non sequiturs. Here’s hoping they’re all back for more crime-busting and sidesplitting shifts.
This article appears in August 1 • 2025.