TL;DR: Liam Neeson deadpans his way through a Naked Gun reboot that shouldn’t work but does, thanks to its total commitment to ridiculousness and a cast willing to go all-in on the absurdity.

I never thought I’d see the day when Liam Neeson — the growling, phone-threatening boogeyman of the Taken franchise — would step into the oversized, clown-shoe footprints of Leslie Nielsen. Yet here we are in 2025, sitting in a theater watching Neeson play Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., son of the most gloriously oblivious lawman to ever grace the screen. The question isn’t does it work? The question is how in God’s name does it work this well?

Because here’s the thing: The Naked Gun reboot, directed by Akiva Schaffer (of Lonely Island and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping fame), shouldn’t exist. The original Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trilogy was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for slapstick parody in the late 80s and early 90s — a time when the genre had both the budget and the cultural space to throw jokes at you like dodgeballs in a school gym. To revive that style now, in the age of hyper-self-aware meta-comedies and Twitter threads that ruin jokes before you’ve even heard them, feels like it should be a kamikaze mission. And yet, against all odds, it works. Not perfectly. Not even close. But joyfully, stupidly, wonderfully enough.

Liam Neeson: The Man You Didn’t Know You Needed

The reboot’s greatest gamble was always going to be its lead. Leslie Nielsen was a unicorn in human form — an actor who could deliver absurdity with the kind of childlike sincerity that made you believe he didn’t even know he was in a comedy. Neeson, on the other hand, has been playing a particular brand of action stoicism for over a decade. If Nielsen’s Drebin was a labrador retriever in a police uniform, Neeson’s Drebin Jr. is a Rottweiler wearing a party hat he doesn’t realize is there.

It turns out, that’s the point. Neeson leans into the sheer absurdity of his own image, using that deep, gravelly voice (now even sillier than in Taken) to deliver lines so dumb they might as well have been scribbled on the back of a Mad Magazine fold-in. He’s not trying to be Nielsen. He’s doing something different: a man whose intensity is the joke.

The Plot (If You Can Call It That)

Much like its predecessors, the new Naked Gun uses a cop-movie framework purely as scaffolding for gags. Drebin Jr. is haunted by the shadow of his late father’s career and, in moments of surreal sincerity, actually addresses monologues to him, begging for a sign — “like an owl or something.” His partner, Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser, perfectly cast), is the son of George Kennedy’s character from the originals, and the two find themselves investigating the suspicious death of a man in a self-driving electric car.

Naturally, this leads them to a Musk-esque tech plutocrat named Richard Cane (Danny Huston, radiating exactly the right level of oily smugness), a woman who may or may not be a femme fatale, and a cascade of setpieces that veer from hilariously stupid to borderline surreal.

Pamela Anderson and The Line That Broke the Room

Pamela Anderson plays Beth, the dead man’s sister and a true-crime novelist, and she is, against all expectation, one of the movie’s secret weapons. When Drebin first sees her, the voiceover that accompanies his reaction contains a line so bizarrely offensive and unexpected that the screening I attended went into a state of stunned, howling laughter. It’s the kind of joke that shouldn’t work in 2025, yet somehow does, partly because it commits so fully to its own audacity.

Anderson plays it earnestly, giving the romance between Beth and Drebin a strangely sincere undercurrent that makes the inevitable slapstick meltdowns even funnier.

Style, Nostalgia, and the Ghost of the 80s

Visually, Schaffer and his co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand nail the 80s/90s cop-movie aesthetic: the hazy LA sunsets, the synth-tinged soundtrack, the slightly too-polished action beats. There are shades of Beverly Hills Cop, Terminator, and Lethal Weapon, but with the absurdity cranked up to eleven. One of the film’s standout sequences is an over-the-top winter-sports music montage straight out of a Wham! video, inserted for no discernible reason other than to make you laugh until your ribs hurt.

The movie even manages to pull off a Zucker-style visual gag involving a line of people politely queueing for violence — a direct homage to Airplane! that proves the team knows its lineage.

The Verdict

Let’s be honest: This reboot is not rewriting the book on spoof comedies. It is, in the truest sense, disposable entertainment — a sugar rush of sight gags, bad puns, and shameless non sequiturs. But it’s also a reminder of how rare it is to see a film commit this hard to being silly. It doesn’t wink at you about how clever it is. It just throws the pie and lets you laugh when it hits.

Neeson may never match Nielsen’s eerie innocence, but he’s found his own comedic gear here, and paired with Anderson, Hauser, and Huston, the result is a reboot that earns its place — not by being necessary, but by being fun.