So it’s perhaps a more modern comedy triumvirate whose influence can be best felt in the 2025 movie: the Lonely Island. While Schaffer is the only credited member of that comedy troupe listed on the screenplay (Jorma Taccone is credited as a consultant, and Andy Samberg at least makes a vocal cameo in the picture), the finished film feels just as descended from the late 2000s glory days of SNL digital shorts like “I’m on a Boat” and “The Ballad of Captain Jack Sparrow.” It’s irreverent and absurd, and sold with a maximalist polish by its director in a way that David Zucker never would have thought about.
With excessively slick cinematography and sometimes propulsive editing, Schaffer visually and aurally highlights his modern reference points. When the film started during an ostensibly tense bank heist with a seething score which imitated a ticking clock, I even wondered for a moment whether the composer was trying to emulate Hans Zimmer or Lorne Balfe. It turned out the composer is Balfe, the maestro behind symphonic derring-do in the last three Mission: Impossible movies. (And wait until one gets to a pretty canny M:I – Fallout gag in the backstretch of the new Naked Gun.)
The sophistication of the parody goes a long way toward buttressing a movie that has a disposition located somewhere between happy-go-lucky and kitchen-sink desperation. An unapologetic gag bag of a movie, Naked Gun gallops between one-liners, visual dad jokes made flesh, and even out-of-focus background bits playing out in the margins. Much of it is crass and lowbrow, but it works more than it doesn’t.
Among the big wins is the casting of Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. In a riff at the modern day’s obsession with legacy sequels, Frank Drebin Jr. is the son of Nielsen’s Frank (and for that matter Priscilla Presley’s Jane) and he works at a Police Squad populated entirely by the sons of the original film’s cast, including the reliable Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr.. Frank has his father’s deadpan, but it’s delivered with a raspier, crankier, and noticeably Irish sense of befuddled ennui. He’s the kind of guy who laments about the good ol’ days when he hears someone mention the term “electric car.” It’s just, oddly enough, for him the good ol’ days mean “back when the only things electric were lights, the chair, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago!”
So you can imagine Frank has reason to be suspicious of billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a vaguely Elon Musk-like figure who made his fortune on electric cars but also wants to be seen as a tough guy. He claims that he too remembers when men were men. He likewise seems to be mixed up in the mysterious death of a scientist whose sister Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) has turned to Police Squad for help.
The rest of the plot pretty much goes through all the steps you would expect, occasionally referencing the noir and procedural DNA of the O.G. Naked Gun, but more often than not favoring the aforementioned modern blockbuster touchstones. In the movie’s best moments, Schaffer and company even find a way to throw out parody altogether in favor of maximal absurdism, such as a romantic montage about Frank and Beth at a cabin in the woods that is too demented and delirious to give away.
