'The Naked Gun' (2025) Is, Shockingly, Worthy Of The Title

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Related News Story Before We Start

Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are reportedly dating.

I first saw this story in People, credited to an anonymous source, but now it’s everywhere. Other outlets—PageSix, the DailyMail—have since reported it, crediting different anonymous sources (though how could they know?). Pamela Anderson (58) and Liam Neeson (73) are dating, and supposedly have been for a while (the news stories all include their ages, so I figured I had to).

Pam cooks and gardens at home. It’s wholesome and appealing and very un-Hollywood, and Liam loves that,” a source told the Daily Mail Wednesday, adding that Neeson “actually gets involved” in Anderson’s daily activities. [PageSix]

She gardens??? That’s so un-Hollywood! My plants are always wilting when actors walk by!

[Bravo’s Andy Cohen], 57, insisted to listeners [of his radio show] Wednesday that Anderson, 58, and Neeson, 73, “just work.”

He explained, “She is a formidable human being, Pamela Anderson. She really is. What she’s been through and how she kind of reclaimed herself and redefined herself [is impressive].”

Co-host John Hill agreed that the duo are a “good match.”

At first I wondered whether this story was fake, a good-natured publicity stunt timed to drop the same week as the movie starring Pam and Liam movie released, which also plays on exactly the kind of odd-couple, casting-against-type quality that Naked Gun always had. If so, fun! Not enough low-stakes publicity stunts these days, I say.

But if Bravo’s Andy Cohen says it’s real, I guess it’s real. So… good for them. Neeson was previously married to Natasha Richardson, who died in a skiing accident in 2009. Pamela Anderson got divorced from her fifth husband, her ex-bodyguard Dan Hayhurst, in 2022.

Hard to say whether this one is for the long haul or just a standard fling between two co-stars. Either way, I look forward to Liam Neeson one day getting into a screaming match with Kid Rock at an awards show.

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The Naked Gun (2025) is as Great as Everyone Says, Maybe Better.

The other day, there was a Noah Garfinkel tweet that went, “The thing that’s funny about most photoshop jokes is that somebody took a stupid idea seriously enough to invest the time to make it. If you use A.I. it’s just like, yeah, I guess that’s what that would look like.”

If I had to point to one reason why The Naked Gun reboot (sequel?) works when it absolutely shouldn’t, it’s this. In a world where you can just sort of shrug and mash things into existence without much effort, where you can buy decals of Calvin praying to the cross or t-shirts of Rick and Morty skewering pronouns, The Naked Gun (2025) has the ineffable feel of craft, of silly ideas sweated into existence with great care. Leslie Nielsen’s acting especially was always about “committing to the bit,” and the makers of the new Naked Gun have committed to the bit.

Listen, if you’re already disinclined towards the idea of trying to draft on the name recognition and recreate the success of The Naked Gun (1988)—one of the greatest comedies of the 20th century, a movie I’ve bonded over with some of my best friends and showed to my kids and nephews the second they could understand it—I understand. IP-driven cinema is poisoning culture. Sequels to comedies almost never work. The entire idea of trying to reheat old jokes (jokes from 18 months ago let alone 40 years ago) is, to some extent, anti-comedy. Comedy often involves a formula, sure, but the parts we enjoy the most rely on surprise, and respect neither pedigree nor hierarchy. A joke does not get funnier when society deems it important, usually less so. Thus I’m actually hesitant to give The Naked Gun a positive view, lest it give dull movie execs any ideas.

All that being said, honestly compels me to tell you that The Naked Gun is very funny, with both a sensibility and a level of craft that does the original proud. For that, I have to credit the filmmakers, at least in part because so many other explanations of why some comedy works and other doesn’t are inherently elusive. This filmmaking team includes Akiva Shaffer from The Lonely Island directing and Brandon Trost of The FP (and a bunch of other projects) as the cinematographer, among others.

The credited writing team includes Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (both of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and who worked with Shaffer on Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers), with previous, uncredited drafts from Family Guy writers Alec Sulkin and Mark Hentemann. Shaffer and Trost seems most relevant partly because I’m the most familiar with their work (though Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is great if you haven’t seen it), but also because it seems like they’ve spent their careers providing use cases for the hypothesis that “taking a stupid idea seriously enough to invest the time to make it” is the root of the best comedy.

It’s also true that if the casting doesn’t work, nothing works. Credit must go, then, to whoever came up with Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., an odd choice on first blush but an inspired one if you ever saw glimpses of Neeson doing comedy in Life’s Too Short and a couple other things. That was a small sample size, to be sure, but extremely promising if the goal was finding someone who can be funny because they’re not obviously trying to be funny. Ed Helms was at one point attached to star, with a script by the guys from Reno 911, and while I enjoy both Helms and Reno 911, theirs is a looser, more ingratiating kind of comedy that I can’t imagine would’ve worked nearly as well in what is essentially a hard-boiled cop show parody. Neeson doesn’t impersonate Nielsen, exactly, in fact if anything he’s a bit more naturalistic. But the comedy works for similar reasons. Nielsen has a stately, authority-figure face (plus a little more physical presence), which turns out to be perfect for skewering authority figures. Neeson’s Drebin can read tough and authoritative when necessary, but then when it turns out that he’s just a bully, selfish, or a moron, it ends up being that much funnier. A comment on authority in general.

Oh right, Neeson plays Drebin, Jr. He’s supposed to be Frank Sr.’s (Nielsen’s) son, which I suppose technically makes this a sequel, not a reboot, discounting the very reboot-coded title. That “Liam Neeson” kind of sounds like “Leslie Nielsen,” on top of him bringing a similar energy is some kind of cosmic synergy. (Additional fun fact: at 26 years older than Neeson, Nielsen is nearly dead on for the average age of fathers in 1952, when Neeson was born). In one of the first scenes, Drebin Jr. (along with his partner, Ed Hocken Jr, played by the always great Paul Walter Hauser) goes to investigate a car accident that ultimately proves to be more than meets the eye. To clean up the wrecked vehicle, the cops have a giant carnival claw of the kind kids feed a dollar at Dave and Busters for a chance to snare a plush prize. The assembled cops hang on the joystick operator’s every move and groan in unison when he drops the car.

If you’ve seen the original as many times as I have, you know that that’s exactly the kind of joke it would’ve had. And yet faithfulness to the source isn’t even the reason it’s funny. It’s funny also partly because the claw is a really dumb idea that they spent countless man-hours bringing to life, ultimately dropping a real wrecked car, presumably with a crane. Much like all the best Lonely Island videos, this is a movie that understands on a cellular level that every gag is just a handoff between concept and execution. The idea is great, like any good joke premise, but with a visual medium, everything in the frame offers an opportunity for another tag. All the best ones kind of build and build.

In some way, every great million-joke movie like this is also sort of a love letter to community. Film is always a collaborative medium, but comedies like this especially offer the kinds of gags that mostly only happen through riffing—there’s an agreed funny premise that everyone brings their own additional little flourish to, that makes the bit a little funnier and a little funnier until it hopefully ends in a big crescendo. With the best bits, no one person can take credit for the whole. Probably part of the reason why it feels so good to laugh at such things is that it scratches some deep, evolutionary desire to be part of a tribe, and be a valued member of that tribe. It’s one of our root motivators. The laughing lets you know that you’re in the gang. Now let’s go kill a mammoth, fucker! (*sack taps loin cloth*)