The Naked Gun Review | A Zippy and Updated Spoof That Hilariously Roasts Every Cliché

The Naked Gun film series starring the late Leslie Nielsen was known for its spoofy nature. The kind of humor using wordplay and pop culture references has made those films the go-to stress-buster comedy entertainers. The franchise gets its sequel almost 30 years after the last one, and this time the mantle is passed to Liam Neeson. With the parody nature of the movie getting to roast all the kinds of cliches we see in all these over-the-top heroism films, this new flick from Akiva Schaffer is crisp and hilarious.

Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the late Frank Drebin, is our hero, and much like his father, he is also a part of the Police Squad. At one point, the suspicious murder of a tech guy comes under the investigation of Drebin. The investigation led Drebin to the EV giant Richard Cane, and what we see here is Drebin’s attempts to find out the truth.

Frankly, I don’t even know why I talked about the plot of this film. Because the plot has no significance here, as the only agenda is to mock the impracticality in most of these super cop, super agent kind of films. Since the last movie in the franchise was released almost three decades ago, the content available for them to spoof is enormous. The movie begins with a sequence that shows us a hard drive kind of thing, and the name of that device is “plot device.” From that point, pretty much every moment you are witnessing is basically the script trying to expose the overused formulaic elements. As someone who reviews films, I almost felt guilty of laughing at some of the hilarious critiques of the existing writing methods.

You can sort of divide the kind of humor in this movie into four categories. The first one is the kind that mocks the stereotypes. One of them was the coffee cup associated with the police officers, and it was hilarious when a coffee cup was passed to Drebin from outside while he was driving the car. There is a sequence where we see the movie making fun of agents breaking their phones after making calls. The second category is wordplay humor. There are instances where someone would ask the hero, “May I know your name?” and the reply would be Yes, you may, with both of them continuing the conversation in the most deadpan way possible. Then there are these references to the vintage spoofy scary movies. The last one is the political one, and my favorite one was the way Drebin quickly identifies the only white guy he shot from the back.

Liam Neeson, who has been doing this action hero special agent kind of character, post the success of Taken, performing a character like this one, is actually making the movie funnier. I was somewhere expecting him to deliver some lines that would make a parody of his own on-screen image. Pamela Anderson is the Bond girl kind of character to Frank Drebin. Paul Walter Hauser plays the role of Capt. Ed Hocken Jr.. Danny Huston essays the role of the main antagonist, and the interaction between him and Neeson offers a lot of laugh-out-loud moments.

In a way, something like a reboot to the Naked Gun franchise was imperative, as we are seeing derivative event films far too often these days. Like I already said, the fact that a reputed action star like Liam Neeson is doing this almost self-deprecating film makes the movie extremely funny. The Naked Gun offers the audience that much-needed deadpan roasting fun with a script that pretty much has all the timely updates.