The Naked Gun

I think everybody was understandably nervous about a new Naked Gun movie in 2025. After slapstick and satire were dragged into the mud in the 2000's by the Friedman/Seltzer "movies", there was little hope for this kind of humor in the movies. Liam Neeson was inspired casting, but it would be nothing without razor-sharp writing, perfect pacing, and a game cast that knows how to delivery the material just the right way. Does this stack up against the original Naked Gun? No, but honestly, that wasn't the expectation. The real question is, does it do the job of being a 21st century Naked Gun? Yes ... but that's also all it does. What do I mean by that? It's hard to put into words. This and the original Naked Gun both revolve around a deadpan detective that gets swept up in an insane, way-too-big-for-the-police-to-handle plot. Zaniness abounds around them, and sometimes from them (albeit without expression). The two Frank Drebins can be somewhat clueless to their surroundings. There's a blonde bombshell. A somewhat oafish partner. The basic elements are all there, even if in slightly different amounts (the oafish partner barely plays a role in the new movie, for instance). The never-off firehose of jokes is present, just like in the first, and they make sure to pack jokes in the foreground and background too. Swap out the cast for the original, and your average person would be hard-pressed to see the difference between this and the original. They might even think this is a leftover script from back in the day. But if you squint real hard, the differences show, and it's all in the temperature of the jokes. The original writing team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker made sure to over-stuff the script with more jokes than any one human being could react to in a single sitting, but they also infused an edge into their jokes that sat in stark contrast to the absurdity. Nordberg being abused and injured beyond the point of human tolerance, for instance, went from funny to cruel to funny again. All the movies made by the ZAZ team had darkness in the material. Not full-on gallows humor, but some jokes that pushed the boundaries just enough. This version lacks that killer instinct. It isn't a case of "woke" or being over-sensitive to the modern climate, because many of the darker jokes in the original don't have anything offensive in them. It feels more like the movie was crafted to aim for a broader audience. There's nothing wrong with that, but it leaves the humor feeling like it's pulling punches. The original Naked Gun didn't work just because of the jokes, it worked because it was also lampooning a genre of movies. This Naked Gun is a long string of jokes. Well-told jokes, funny jokes, but that support structure is gone. Again, this is a fun movie. I chuckled a fair number of times, and smiled plenty, and don't regret seeing it. It beat my expectations handily. But I can also see that it is content being the simplest version of itself, and that's where my disappointment comes in. The Naked Gun 2025 has all the components to be amazing, and it settles for good.