The Naked Gun (2025) Review

Score: 8/10
The new Naked Gun hits its main target: it is super funny. Akiva Schaffer steers a brisk, joke-dense revival that treats silliness like a sacred duty, and the hit rate is high enough that the misses barely matter.

What works

• Liam Neeson’s deadpan: Casting him as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. is the movie’s best gag and its backbone. He never winks, and the more serious he gets, the funnier the scene becomes.
• Gag variety and pace: Sight gags, wordplay, background business, stunt absurdity. The movie rarely goes more than a few seconds without a punchline, and the 85 minute runtime keeps it tight.
• Schaffer’s tone: The Lonely Island DNA shows in the confident rhythm and modern references, but the spirit feels true to the Police Squad school of comedy.
• Supporting cast: Pamela Anderson leans into a self-aware glamour that plays great against Neeson’s granite face. Paul Walter Hauser is an ideal partner-in-chaos. CCH Pounder and Danny Huston give the nonsense a serious frame to bounce off.

What stumbles

• Third act story beats: When the plot tries to matter, momentum dips a bit. The movie is funniest when it forgets about stakes and just stacks jokes.
• A few safe callbacks: Some nods to the original land, others feel like required checkpoints. The new material is stronger than the reference humor.

The comedy style

This isn’t a copy-paste of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker era. The jokes are broader in places and cleaner in others, with some edges sanded to fit a 2025 studio comedy. The best sequences commit to escalating physical comedy and visual invention rather than topical riffs, which will help the film age better than most reference-heavy spoofs.

Neeson plays Drebin Jr. like a professional klutz who thinks he is the only adult in the room, and the straight-man discipline sells even the corniest bits. Anderson’s timing is sharp and game. Hauser brings warm goofiness without stealing focus. It is a well-balanced ensemble for a joke-delivery machine.

Parody has been quiet on the big screen for a while. This one makes the case for bringing it back. Not every punchline lands, but enough do that you leave happy. As a legacy sequel it respects the deadpan tradition and updates it just enough. If you want wall-to-wall gags and a crowd-pleaser vibe, this delivers.