The Naked Gun (Schaffer, 2025)

The Naked Gun dashes along for its first thirty minutes, eliciting more giggles and groans than guffaws, but doing so at a pace that masks how little hold its frame narrative has on our engagement or even attention. Once it slows down, it can’t end fast enough to salvage the marginal but real good will it accumulated, making it a failed experiment rather than a successful reboot.

I suspect if this had been the first four episodes of a rebooted television series, parceled out in 22 minute episodes, I probably would have felt differently. Those of us who grew up with the original were weaned on television sitcoms that majored in melodrama. Slapstick or farce was something different, and as with the films of Mel Brooks or the then nascent Saturday Night Live, these parody comedies were willing to move rapid fire through ten jokes on the hopes that one would land.

And…to be fair, there are a few that land here. They just get drowned out rather than buoyed by recycled misunderstandings and double-entendres. The larger problem is that when one does land — a monologue about Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes preserved on a non-Internet server for instance — it doesn’t build any comedic momentum since it is by necessity unrelated to less funny jokes that come before or after. This critique is as much about the genre of the film then the execution of it. The timing of the actors is fine, and the call-backs to the original are generous without being too redundant.

If I am in the minority about the film overall, I am probably even more off the rails in my assessment of Liam Neeson’s performance. Ultimately, it comes across as stunt casting, playing off his tough guy image from films such as Taken to make Drebin Jr.’s moments of incompetence a fraction more unexpected. Perhaps such is the nature of acting in slapstick, but he never elevates the material, never enhances a laugh by finding a beat that is anything other than the most telegraphed one. Audiences have had decades of Robin Williams and Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and Jack Black to convince us that slapstick and manic are the same thing, so casting the seventy-three year-old Neeson to act infantile occasionally bordered on unintentional mocking of the elderly.

But with comedy it is hard to argue with viewers about whether they laughed or not. The Naked Gun is not so bad that I never laughed, but I felt I could have gotten the same about of laugher from rewatching an episode of the original. Reboots should improve in some way on the original, or at least try to. This just recycles the format without any attempts at refreshing it.