The Naked Gun Gives Us Deadpan Neeson—Locked, Loaded, and Fully Caffeinated

The Naked Gun

★ ★ ★ ½

The Naked Gun is a movie that leans across the table and whispers to us, “We can finally laugh at the jokes we’re not supposed to laugh at again.” Movies like this exist in their own alternate realities where the hero, and supporting protagonists can ask serious questions and get the thickest, dumbest responses.

Take when Frank Drebin Jr (Liam Neeson) first meets middle-aged bombshell Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) in the police precinct. He politely gestures to a chair, “Please have a seat.” She doesn’t miss a beat: “No thanks, I have plenty of seats at home.”

Out of context, that might not seem too funny. But in this movie, the jokes come so fast—just enough to be entertaining, not terribly overwhelming—that the ones that land with dull thuds are followed by several more that stick the landing.

Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr and Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr
© 2025 Paramount Pictures / Fuzzy Door

With movies like this, the plot isn’t really the point, but there is a halfway decent one beneath Frank Jr’s daffy buffoonery. The film opens on a bank robbery, thwarted by Frank undercover as a Girl Scout. The robbery turns out to be a distraction for master thief Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand) to steal something called a P.L.O.T. Device. Frank’s job: figure out what Richard Cane’s (Danny Huston) up to, what the device does, and stop it—despite having no clue what “it” actually is.

Early in the film, there’s a scene that bridges the gap between the previous trilogy and this new revival. The Police Squad precinct has a hallway of shrines dedicated to cops that have passed on. We see the shrines of the cops from the last series of films, and their sons kneeling before them paying homage, asking for guidance to make them better cops. Frank Jr. tells the picture of Frank Sr., “I want to be just like you, but at the same time be completely different and original.”

Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr
© 2025 Paramount Pictures / Fuzzy Door

It’s funny, but also unexpectedly sincere—a sly, slick nod at what this film is trying to do. It wants to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, but different enough to stand on its own two feet. Mostly, it succeeds.

Neeson’s Frank Jr. is darker, much more grave and serious than Leslie Nielsen as Frank Sr. Nielsen was deadpan serious, though more lighthearted. Neeson plays the role as if he’s in the umpteenth iteration of the Taken franchise, or almost any action film he’s starred in since his turn as Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins. It’s like he’s an action star that doesn’t know he’s in a comedy spoof about every cop movie cliché they can fit in. Neeson understands the role, a cop trying to rise above his father’s shadow and make him proud. Here, it strikes the perfect tone.

The film’s soundtrack doesn’t always know this is a comedy either, giving some of the action scenes the thunderous bravado of Hans Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight. Other times, the score leans into the yowling bellow of a sexy saxophone you’d hear in a detective movie where the bombshell love interest, backlit by moonlight, approaches a detective down a steaming, dark alley. This is to the credit of composer Lorne Balfe, known for both action and comedy scores like Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and The Penguins of Madagascar.

Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport and Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr
© 2025 Paramount Pictures / Fuzzy Door

Pamela Anderson seems to be on a career resurgence. Her recent performance in The Last Showgirl was potentially career-redefining. Here, she plays the bombshell to perfection, matching Neeson toe-to-toe, one gag after another. It’s a nice surprise to see her turn in a seriously solid, standout performance in a film that’s anything but serious. Between this and her emotionally dramatic role as the forgotten dancer at the end of her career in The Last Showgirl, Anderson might find her movie dance card full for quite some time.

The Naked Gun is the kind of film you see to escape your reality where you can just turn off your brain, munch on some popcorn and laugh out loud a lot. It tells the jokes we can’t tell in the breakroom at work, but it gets away with it. It’s likely to be one of those film reprisals which become a beloved classic that stands alongside its originator.

If 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is senior, and The Naked Gun is junior, the latter is following in dad’s footsteps just fine—and carving out its own zany crime fighting niche. Frank Jr. doesn’t just inherit dad’s badge, he has the astonishing ability to survive explosions and gunfire while holding an endless cup of coffee—just like dad.