In 1982, there were six episodes of Police Squad! that aired on television, but apparently very few people noticed at the time. That’s despite the acclaim of Airplane! in 1980, which was helmed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, with the trio re-teaming to do for crime shows what Airplane! did for aviation-related disaster movies. It was a classic short-lived sitcom, and also quite ahead of its time, given it was densely packed with jokes in a way that required more attention than the majority of sitcoms at the time. That’s not to say sitcoms made before 1982 couldn’t be funny, but they were rarely as non-stop as Police Squad!, and it took until later, as seen with the likes of The Simpsons and Arrested Development, for relentlessly paced sitcoms to find more of an audience. Hell, with Arrested Development, it also wasn’t exactly popular, but at least it scraped by and aired three seasons in a row, plus two later on during the streaming era, meaning it had many more episodes than Police Squad!
But Police Squad! managed to live on, thanks to it being retooled for the big screen, with The Naked Gun movies. Leslie Nielsen, who was also one of the best parts of Airplane!, returned as Frank Drebin (and to be fair, Ed Williams played Ted Olsen in both Police Squad! and the first three Naked Gun movies), but Nielsen was all you really needed, since the new cast members were all well-utilized and appropriately funny. The Naked Gun movies got a little sillier than Police Squad!, which also had its surreal and absurd moments, but was a bit more grounded overall. The TV budget probably had something to do with that, as did the fact that cop shows themselves were a bit more down-to-earth than the sorts of cop movies (plus some film noir flicks) that The Naked Gun movies aimed to parody. So, in the interest of highlighting how silly these movies were, the original trilogy plus the 2025 legacy sequel are all ranked below, not in terms of quality, but according to how surreal they are.
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‘The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear’ (1991)
It’s a bit ominous to preface just about any statement with a “Hear me out,” but it’s a good thing to apply to the following one: “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear is the most grounded of all The Naked Gun movies.” It’s still utterly ridiculous, and much more willing to dip into surrealism than Police Squad!, but it loses surrealism points for its premise. That premise involves a conspiracy relating to environmentalism, with certain people wanting to silence a prominent individual who may have made a breakthrough in a more renewable form of energy. Like, from there, it naturally gets ridiculous, but there’s a certain level of satire here compared to the more parody-focused other movies. It’s still a parody film, and a pretty good one at that, but it’s a little more willing to engage with real-world issues and has some stuff that could almost be called social commentary. And it’s worth noting that sometimes, parody and satire cross over quite well, but they’re not exactly the same thing. It’s wrong to use the words completely interchangeably.
Surely, it can be serious, then? It’s not to too great an extent, thankfully, and don’t call it Shirley. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear being more grounded than the other films in the series only goes so far if you want to argue it’s grounded in any other sense. Actually, on a more meta level, this one does the expected thing of delivering a similar experience to the first movie, but just not as good, making it a by-the-numbers sequel in that regard (and not one of those rare second films in a trilogy that stand as the best). But again, still silly. Jane grows a third hand at one point that’s never seen again, and Nordberg has his eventually giant gun he keeps assembling mid-shootout, for a couple of examples. But of all the surreal movies in this series, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear is perhaps the least bizarre.
3
‘The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!’ (1988)
The best of all The Naked Gun movies is the first, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, which is a hopefully uncontroversial thing to say. No “hear me out” needed here. Of the Leslie Nielsen trilogy, though, it is the one with the most outlandish premise, since the main antagonist here is plotting to assassinate the Queen during her U.S. trip, and has a beeper that effectively works as a mind control device as a method to achieve this, and even if you want to argue it’s hypnosis, it would still count as an outlandish form of that. But in a world where numerous world leaders who are all opposed to the U.S. have a meeting about how to team together and take down America, and someone like Frank Drebin can successfully infiltrate said meeting, then some kind of mind control is something you can roll with.
Elsewhere, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! doesn’t get quite as silly as its two main sequels, and its 2025 legacy sequel, but that main storyline is the reason it feels a bit more surreal overall than its first sequel. And, again, it represents an escalation in silliness compared to Police Squad!, but that’s fitting for its wider scope and the fact that it has a movie budget to play around with. There are other Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker movies that get wackier for sure, including 1984’s Top Secret!, though you still get enough weirdness here to satisfy. It’s nice it still has some deadpan and even subtle humor, though, at least in some moments, compared to the third film. Speaking of…
2
‘Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult’ (1994)
Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult has the silliest title of any Naked Gun movie, so points there, maybe? Less charitably, it’s also overall kind of dumb in a way that’s only sporadically funny. It’s got a story about Frank having to come out of retirement for one last job, which isn’t too out there by cop movie standards, playing into that cliché while also making fun of it. And that assignment involves going undercover in a prison to get information about a group of terrorists who are collectively planning to detonate a bomb at the Academy Awards. That’s maybe a little more grounded than mind control, which plays a part in the original movie and the 2025 one, in a way, but it’s still a bit outlandish, and the premise is navigated in a way that makes it even sillier.
And there’s an escalation in physical carnage, with a prison riot involving Frank twisting the head off a prison guard, and the head keeps screaming.
If you just want an increase in physical and crude humor, then you get that with Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, and you might find it funny, then. It’s not that crossing into wilder territory is a bad thing, more just that the jokes themselves – the ones told in this slightly different territory – aren’t always strong by the standards of the series. But surrealism? Yeah, this film’s got a lot of that. It’s more surreal in the wake of the new movie, since there’s a baby seen at the end of the film who, in just 31 years, will apparently look like a 70-year-old Liam Neeson. And there’s an escalation in physical carnage, with a prison riot involving Frank twisting the head off a prison guard, and the head keeps screaming. Maybe that’s expected stuff for this series, to some extent, but the film’s packed with stuff like that. Plus, it’s a weirder film post-initial release, owing to some of the controversies attached to it… sure, not really the movie’s “fault,” but it might change the way you view it a little.
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‘The Naked Gun’ (2025)
While the first movie might be funnier, and Liam Neeson can’t quite top what Leslie Nielsen did in that first film, The Naked Gun (2025) is still a better legacy sequel than you might expect. Also, perhaps surprisingly, it finds ways to get even wilder and more surreal than any of the other Naked Gun films. It could arguably snatch the #1 spot for the whole snowman sequence alone, which comes out of nowhere during an already silly romantic montage, and makes the film feel like a temporary horror movie parody, complete with an almost threesome that involves said snowman, and later has a first-person POV shot with the snowman wielding a handgun. It’s maybe the best scene in the movie, and perhaps also the strangest sequence in any Naked Gun film, and that’s saying quite a lot.
Getting sidetracked a bit with one scene there, but that’s also what the scene does to the whole movie, so it’s fitting. Anyway, The Naked Gun also has an outlandish plot that involves a device that can turn everyone violent, which is kind of an escalation of what the main villain of the first movie could do. Also, Frank Drebin is reincarnated as an owl, his son can take on the appearance of a young girl, shrinking down to the appropriate size, even, and a scene during the end credits involves Frank Jr. and Beth realizing they’ve been part of a movie all along. And, The Naked Gun also gets funnier when you remember the more grounded films Neeson has starred in, and some of the not-so-great – and overall grim – action movies he’s become known for, since he – like Nielsen before him – is kind of funnier in a movie like this, since his more famous roles haven’t been nearly as silly.
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