The Naked Gun, 2025.
Directed by Akiva Shaffer.
Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, and Danny Huston.
SYNOPSIS:
The Naked Gun is back with Liam Neeson as the offspring of the Lieutenant Frank Drebin character from the TV series Police Squad! and the subsequent Naked Gun trilogy. If you enjoyed the originals, you’ll enjoy this one too (well, I think you will; I did). You also get a code for a digital copy and a smattering of bonus features.
When I wrote about Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, one thing that crossed my mind but I didn’t discuss in the review was the question of whether the humor limited that movie’s box office results. After all, the original 1984 movie had a specific brand of humor that carried over to the new one, so maybe younger audiences thought it was hokey.
However, that theory is thrown off by the great box office numbers for this new iteration of The Naked Gun, which employs the same kinds of hysterial deadpan puns and other kinds of funny moments as its predecessors did. So maybe that style of humor is still in vogue, or maybe older audiences just have more of a hankering for those old school Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movies than for the original This is Spinal Tap.
At any rate, if you enjoyed the original Naked Gun trilogy featuring Leslie Nielsen, then you’ll love this new legacy sequel, which puts Liam Neeson in the role of Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Jr. After he foils a bank robbery, he discovers that the criminal syndicate behind the attempted heist actually used that as a distraction to swipe the P.L.O.T. (Primordial Law of Toughness) Device (I wonder if it was originally called the MacGuffin but the powers that be decided most people wouldn’t get the joke).
Drebin’s investigation into the theft leads him to Richard Cane (Danny Huston), CEO of Edentech, which is, of course, a parody of everything that’s gone sideways in the tech industry over the last few years. Cane has a nefarious plan in store for the P.L.O.T. Device, while Frank ends up striking up a relationship with Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), whose brother was a software engineer at Edentech whose death was ruled a suicide, despite her suspicions otherwise.
The whole plot is as silly as you’d expect, with everyone playing their roles with the utmost seriousness, as if this is a remake of The Maltese Falcon. That just makes it even funnier, just as the old school ZAZ movies portrayed their characters, and I really hope this is the start of a new series of Naked Gun movies (yes, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go anywhere near an Airplane! teboot these days, for very good reason).
The bonus features found on this Blu-ray disc aren’t very in-depth, but that’s to be expected these days. Maybe if this iteration of The Naked Gun has some kind of cultural staying power, it will be worthy of a 10th Anniversary edition somewhere down the road, but for now, what’s found here will suffice.
The main chunk of running time for the extras is 28 minutes of outtakes and deleted, alternate, and extended scenes. The rest of them consist of featurettes running less than 10 minutes each, for a total of about 30 minutes.
A Legacy of Laughter lives up to its name with a look back on the original trilogy while Son of a (Naked) Gun looks at Neeson’s character and The Funny Femme Fatale does the same for Anderson’s role. The Really Unusual Suspects extends that look to the rest of the cast.
Finally, On a Set Within a Set That’s in a Set (that title might be a spoiler) looks at one particular very funny gag and Dropping the Balls examines the finale, which does what you would expect with the concept of dropping a ball on New Year’s Eve.
A code for a digital copy rounds this one out.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
