REVIEW: ‘The Naked Gun’ hits the target, which might test your gag reflex

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Among its other attributes, the 1980 movie “Airplane!” was responsible for a pioneering pop-culture discovery: that non-comic actors playing it straight in a comedy could be insanely funny. Leslie Nielsen – up until then known as a stone-faced dramatic actor – was the prime beneficiary, parlaying his “Airplane!” turn as Dr. Rumack (“Don’t call me Shirley”) into an entire second career as a deadpan farceur in TV’s “Police Squad!” and three “Naked Gun” movie spin-offs.

Those projects were spoofs of 1970s police shows goosed with Mad Magazine sight gags and “Pink Panther”-style slapstick – all cultural references that are sadly out of date in 2025. Do we need a belated third sequel to “The Naked Gun,” then, or is this it just a case of nostalgia squared? Regardless, we’ve got one, and it’s extremely funny until it isn’t.

The director is Akiva Schaffer, part of Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island comedy crew, who has since branched out to movies such as 2016’s “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” and Tim Robinson’s TV sketch comedy “I Think You Should Leave.” More importantly, the star is Liam Neeson, for whom “The Naked Gun” is the latest curlicue in a proper pig’s tail of a career. From an Oscar nomination for playing a Holocaust saviour in “Schindler’s List” to his reinvention in the new millennium as a sour-faced B-movie action star to filling Nielsen’s police-issue brogans as Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Neeson has never stooped to conquer but, rather, has striven to bring the material up to his level.

In the new “Naked Gun,” he’s technically Frank Drebin Jr., seen tearfully talking to a wall photo of Nielsen in police headquarters. The camera cuts to Frank’s partner, Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) tearfully talking to a wall photo of his father (played in the original films by George Kennedy) and then to an entire line of police detectives tearfully talking to photos of their dads. So far, so good.

In fact, the early scenes of “The Naked Gun” so ably recapture the manic, anything-goes highs of the early movies that you settle into your seat for a rollicking time, and, for a while, that’s what you get. The background sight gags fly by at 100 mph and the dialogue is gloriously dumb. (“UCLA?” Frank asks a woman who’s mentioned she went to college in the area. “Yes, I can see it – I live here,” is the response.)

A running joke about people handing Frank cups of coffee builds and builds, and there are just enough nods to current events and attitudes to give “The Naked Gun” some edge: An O.J. Simpson joke here, a perfectly served Black Lives Matter zinger there. The film’s chief villain (Danny Huston) is a tech-bro billionaire with a Project 2025 attitude toward the common man, and just to make sure we get it, his head henchman (Kevin Durand) is a bottle-blond ringer for Elon Musk. (Other random appearances include rapper Busta Rhymes, YouTube star Liza Koshy and a much-loved presence from the first “Naked Gun.”)

Pamela Anderson gamely plays Frank’s love interest, Beth Davenport, who’s mourning the mysterious death of her brother, the tech titan’s righthand man. That’s right, “The Naked Gun” has a plot, and by the film’s midpoint it has started elbowing the comedy out of the way. There’s nothing here as crazy-funny as Frank Sr’s assault on Queen Elizabeth in the 1988 original, although a bit with thermal-imaging binoculars providing the filthiest possible interpretation of benign activities comes close. But the early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

Neeson enters into the spirit of the thing with zeal and a stony demeanour, even in a body-cam sequence of Frank suffering the effects of a particularly toxic chilli dog. His interpretation is more in the Chuck Norris toughest-guy-on-earth mode, biting gun barrels in two and ripping off an assailant’s arms, the better to beat him with them. He’s good fun, but you miss the almost primal silliness that galvanized Nielsen’s Frank – the pleasure of a journeyman performer cutting loose after all those decades of playing it straight. It may be that Neeson is too good an actor for a down-and-dirty comedy like “The Naked Gun” – perhaps a man who has played Oskar Schindler can only let his hair down so far. Let’s hope he lightens up for the sequels that are almost certain to come. After “Taken 3,” he’s earned it.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

Two and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. At area theatres. Crude/sexual material, violence/bloody images and brief partial nudity. 78 minutes.