Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in The Naked Gun

We live in an age in which parody is almost impossible, between the absurdity of real life and the complete deconstruction of any and everything offered by the internet, in every possible media format. Indeed, spoofs have not done well, cinematically, since the Scary Movie franchise died off in the early 2010s. We’ve been through every phase of ironic consumption of cinema, leaving us with nowhere to go except back around to sincere, well-crafted comedy. Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is just that—a sincerely made, expertly crafted comedy loaded with jokes that work and brilliant comedic performances.

Technically a sequel—the fourth entry into the Naked Gun franchise—but operating more like a fresh start, The Naked Gun stars Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr., a top cop in the LAPD’s “Police Squad”. Despite stopping crime, Drebin is a liability, his antics costing the city money and creating legal complications for the force. Neeson is perhaps the only actor who could believably step into Leslie Nielsen’s shoes, taking over as the protagonist of the franchise. Like Nielsen, he has a dramatic background that lends gravitas to his words, no matter how silly they may be; unlike Nielsen, Neeson can actually sell the action scenes, too. If you’ve seen Neeson’s turn in Derry Girls, his performance here won’t feel so surprising, but Neeson’s performance does feel like unlocking a new door for his career.

Similarly, Pamela Anderson steps up as the new love interest, true crime novelist Beth Davenport. (Priscilla Presley, the original trilogy’s female lead, gets a brief cameo.) Anderson is the real secret weapon of the film, giving the kind of earnest goofball performance that would have made her a comedy star if anyone gave her this chance before the actual year 2025. She fully commits to the bit, imbuing Beth with the kind of wide-eyed earnestness that makes even the dumbest bits sing, not unlike Julie Hagerty in Airplane!. Indeed, Neeson and Anderson are the most convincing spoof couple since Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, parroting idiotic jokes and tacitly clever wordplay at one another with complete, riveting conviction.

While The Naked Gun fully honors its roots in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker school of spoof comedy, with enough sight gags and verbal gags to choke a bear, this film keenly recalls more recent parodies like Adam McKay’s own police spoof The Other Guys and David Wain’s mock rom-com They Came Together, both which honor their source material by telling competent stories in their respective genres. The Naked Gun is not a complicated plot, but it is cohesive, and a key ingredient in making a spoof work is actually providing a solid plot to hang all the jokes on. The Naked Gun echoes the plot beats of the 1988 original film, but its tech bro update lends the new film a sheen of modern credibility. 

Along the same lines, The Naked Gun is just plain well made. It is tightly edited—the film runs just 85 minutes—the production values are high, the set design incorporates plenty of background gags (including top notch goofs like labelling a walk-in cooler in the police precinct “Cold Cases” or dubbing a sports arena the “Ponzi-Scheme.Com Arena”). It may be a comedy film, but you still have to take the making of it seriously, and it is clear that everyone from Akiva Schaffer down took making The Naked Gun seriously. It actually looks like a real film, not a video shot amongst friends over one golf weekend (ahem, Happy Gilmore 2). 

By taking the story and characters seriously, no matter how silly they may get, and they do get VERY silly, The Naked Gun provides a foundation for its cavalcade of delightful jokes. And those jokes are, no matter how simple they may seem, carefully crafted and deployed in just the right ways, for just the right amount of time. There are a lot of blink and you’ll miss it background gags, there are more non sequiturs than you can count, but the result is a comedy that is tight and functional. The jokes work because they took effort to craft, they only seem effortless because of the actors’ commitment and the editing. The Naked Gun is a reminder that good comedy takes work, but that when done well, there is no better feeling than a room full of strangers laughing together. 

The Naked Gun is now playing exclusively in theaters.