Is this the Marx Brothers of the modern age?
From the trailer:
“What do you want, little girl?”
“I’m not your little girl. I’m Liam Neeson in a little girl mask. Want to dance?”
Cue Neeson enacting frontier justice — ripping off appendages and beating people with their own arms. (Paraphrasing.)
Who greenlit this movie? An outwardly funny comedy for adults, in 2025? I scrambled to list five other comedies from this decade that worked for me in this genre: Strays, No Hard Feelings, Bros, Champions, Bottoms. None set the world on fire — and that’s exactly the point.
This project’s roots stretch back to 2009, when Paramount toyed with a direct-to-TV fourth Naked Gun. Alan Spencer was hired to salvage what sounded like a doomed sequel, with Leslie Nielsen attached. The plan collapsed when Nielsen’s role was cut, then he passed away.
Later, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (Night at the Museum) drafted a reboot with Ed Helms. David Zucker declined to join, saying the tone strayed too far. Zucker himself wrote a parody sequel (The Naked Gun 444 1/4: Nordberg Did It, later Naked: Impossible), a spoof of Mission: Impossible that briefly had traction before the industry moved on.
In 2021 Paramount turned to Seth MacFarlane, who’d long wanted Liam Neeson in the lead. With MacFarlane producing and Akiva Schaffer (The Lonely Island, Hot Rod) directing, the project finally clicked.
The result is an easy movie to root for, though it feels like a relic of another era. Neeson had dabbled in comedy before with MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, but his late-night “serious tough guy as a punchline” persona makes him a natural here. Pamela Anderson looks like stunt casting, but she’s got experience skewering her bombshell image — from the failed Barb Wire to the self-aware late-night press tour that followed.
The difference from the original trilogy is clear: The Naked Gun (1988) built out a full world of characters spun from a TV show. This 2025 version plays closer to late-night sketch comedy. Imagine Conan O’Brien’s Oscars monologue stretched into a feature. If you liked the 2025 Academy Awards, you’ll recognize the cadence.
My favorite gags are when the film leans into “Yes, and…” character absurdities. Drebin meets a femme fatale, Beth Davenport, who writes books about ordinary people solving crimes with uncannily correct hunches. The irony lands, especially with villains. And Neeson’s Drebin Jr. inherits his dad’s clumsiness — even worse behind the wheel. Yelling “Get out of the road!” at pedestrians on the sidewalk is a highlight, as is the inventive string of GPS-related disasters.
The downside? Too often the movie feels built around trailer moments rather than a story. Big gags land harder in a promo than in the film. That’s the MacFarlane effect: at his best (American Dad), he grounds characters in a world of competing rights and wrongs. Here, he doesn’t always extend the same care.
One low point: Drebin and Beth are spied on with heat-vision goggles. The movie nods to the trope’s worst offenders (Chris Cooper in American Beauty comes to mind), but doesn’t decide whether the characters should believe the ruse. It just hangs there.
Still, The Naked Gun (2025) is silly, sometimes too broad for its own good, but undeniably funny. The trailer may have been the silliest ever cut, but there’s enough in the full film to justify the revival. The original Naked Gun remains endlessly quotable and prescient; this one feels like a small miracle in 2025, even if it would’ve been ho-hum thirty years ago.
7/10
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