The Naked Gun ★★★★★

Released: 1st August 2025

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson

Picture a world where comedies have been relegated to streaming duty and used as basic content to fill up digital libraries… Yeah, not so difficult to imagine in 2025, is it? The decline of studio comedy is one of the most tragic casualties of the streaming era, as the genre has now practically ceased to exist at your local multiplex. When Adam Sandler, once a bankable star of yearly theatrical comedies, is breaking yet another Netflix viewership record with no fanfare, it’s easy to see why executives have chosen the easy way out. “They don’t make ’em like they used to”, many would say… but along comes the latest entry in The Naked Gun series and all you could whisper is “they still make ’em, maybe even better”. Suddenly, the sun is shining again, the world is beautiful, and refined dumb humour has found its rightful place back in cinemas.

Seriously though, it’s an actual crime that it took so long for spoof comedy to be a viable subgenre again. Was the 2000s era of cheapshot parodies overkill for the market? (Yes, it probably was). Well, after years of not trying, a miracle child is born: the love between Seth MacFarlane and The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer has blossomed into this crazy affair, which resulted in a long-overdue not-so-legacy sequel in the last great American spoof franchise, The Naked Gun (Liam’s Version). It’s been over 30 years since the last entry, yet not much has changed: police brutality is as high as it ever was, cops are still largely inept, and action cinema remains the most consumed theatrical form of entertainment in the United States. Schaffer is smart not to dwell on the past, instead pointing the camera inward (stay for the post-credits scene) and confronting his audience with the perils of nostalgia — no one’s begging for an O.J. cameo, surely.

Like stepping on a banana peel in the middle of an ice rink, the task of picking up Leslie Nielsen’s fart machine seemed like a statistical impossibility. The Naked Gun (The New Version) is sort of anti-legacy sequel, a film that uses its cultural footprint as a springboard to flip the script on the gruff hypermasculine image of Liam Neeson. Taking on the mantle of Frank Drebin, Neeson doesn’t even try to emulate the goofy noir detective from the Police Squad – instead, he’s closer to parodying Christian Bale’s grimdark Batman outing, acting as a senseless vigilante overstepping the boundaries of law and order. The same goes for Pamela Anderson, whose convincing femme fatale routine is a graceful and fittingly playful subversion of genre tropes in a film that, somewhat fittingly, opens with a riff on The Dark Knight’sheist prologue. As soon as the Mission: Impossible-inspired title card hits the screen, Schaffer starts throwing out witty pop culture jokes with machine gun intensity, inserting absurdist visual gags at every possible (and impossible) moment. Everyone gets a piece: from The Black Eyes Peas to the manosphere’s very own Elon Musk, whose influence on the villain (Danny Huston flexing his comedy bone) is as palpable as it is central to the film’s examination of contemporary America.

While stuffed beavers and cameos may lure you into the comforting safety of callbacks, their presence feels more like a framework rather than recycled material. There’s a sincerity to the film that goes beyond just comedy: at one point, the script gives Neeson and Anderson a platform to look back at their personal tragedies, only to alleviate the tension with the funniest gag of the entire film. Snowmen aside, the humour here feels both timeless and timely, fitting in line with Schaffer’s work on Popstar that seems to only get better with age. It’s a much smarter film than one may assume given the idiotic nature of some jokes, especially when the person delivering the punchline on racial violence is WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes.

Clocking at a meagre 85 minutes, this fever dream of a movie is stuffed to the gills with humour: every frame has at least one visual gag, whether it’s a Spirit Halloween banner in the background or a pair of beekeepers crossing the street with beehives, the careful attention to detail makes the new Naked Gun feel like a true labour of love for the genre. The joke-to-minute ratio is the highest it’s been since Jackass Forever, guaranteed to make theatre auditoriums worldwide hoot and holler. A true classic never goes out of style, a statement Akiva Schaffer clearly echoes with pride and joy: evergreen double entendre work will always elicit man’s laughter. Can it be enough to “save comedy”? Probably not, but it sure as hell can cure my depression. Let ‘er rip, as they say.