It’s common complaint these days that you just can’t make the jokes you used to onscreen. Cancel culture and political correctness have killed the comedy. Not only do audiences not want to watch funny movies any more; writers, directors and actors don’t seem to know how to make them.
The new The Naked Gun, the fourth film in the spoof-comedy franchise which arrives 31 years after the previous instalment, shoves two fingers up at this idea. It’s a very, very funny film; so cheerful and light on its feet that it all but erases the outside world for 85 sparkling minutes, replacing it with a better one in which cops fart audibly while they’re on patrol and villains end up getting their nuts pummelled.
Liam Neeson stars as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr, son of the LA cop so memorably played by Leslie Nielsen in the original films. Staring at his father’s portrait in the police station early on in the film, Drebin Jr explains his motivations: “I want to be just like you,” he murmurs with reverence, “but at the same time also be completely different and original.”
His opportunity to prove himself arises when he is brought in to investigate the murder of a tech worker at a company run by the billionaire Richard Cane (a deliciously evil Danny Huston). Like his late father, Drebin is far from infallible: he initially dismisses the murder as suicide – until the sister of the victim, the sensuous crime author Beth (Pamela Anderson), insists he look into it properly.
The jokes come thick and fast. As is traditional, many are visual gags: people getting run over, people falling down stairs, Neeson dressed as a little girl in a kilt. Other jokes draw, with fine comic timing, on misunderstandings. “Please, take a chair,” Drebin tells Beth when she arrives at his office to discuss her brother’s murder. “No thank you, I have plenty of chairs at home,” she replies tartly, in a cheap-gag format familiar from Drebin senior’s earliest iteration in Police Squad!, the 1982 TV show that launched the franchise.
Despite the zaniness, the plot is no afterthought. If the jokes were ditched and the baddies made less panto, you could even squeeze a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond film out of it. Cane, we learn, has developed a gizmo that, when turned on, turns normal people into screaming chimps desperate to kill one another. His aim is to use the device to reset a world he considers to be ruined: let most of the population wipe itself out, then build back better with a chosen few.
Not everything works. There are ostentatious reminders that all is artifice. In a fight scene, Drebin is shown very obviously punching a stuffed mannequin, and later both Neeson and Anderson are momentarily replaced by body doubles who look only vaguely like them. It’s a confident move, displaying the seams of the film in this way, but it does rather pitch the audience out of the story.
The comedy falters, too. In one sequence, Drebin and Beth steal away for a romantic weekend, and a snowman they make comes freakily to life. The lift-off from spoof action film to something more surreal and whimsical feels awkward. In other cases, jokes are repeated over and over until they lose their charm. But the film has such a high hit rate, it scarcely matters. You feel grateful that the writers and actors are giving it such a good go.
In an interview with You magazine that fed rumours of a romance between himself and Anderson, Neeson has said that that lists of “alts” were provided on set for jokes that didn’t work. This seems key to the film’s success: the comedy feels fresh and improvised, appealingly alive. It’s a real achievement by the director, Akiva Schaffer: too many films today have just one or two gags that feel like they’ve been churned out for the sole purpose of pepping up the film’s trailer.
As for Neeson and Anderson, their chemistry is delightful. It’s a joy to find Neeson using his hackle-raising Irish growl for comic ends, and he turns out to be more than capable of the physical buffoonery too. Anderson, meanwhile, seizes the opportunity to be silly with palpable pleasure; she seems to be laughing for real.
The original Naked Gun film, made in 1988, is worth revisiting. But this one, with its cultural references brought up to date – there’s a relishable gag about OJ Simpson, who starred in the first film – feels miraculously, improbably better.
“The Naked Gun” is in cinemas on 1 August
[See also: “The Bad Guys 2” is the sequel this summer needed]
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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent