The Naked Gun is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It’s a film so dedicated to tripping over its own shoelaces that you start to admire the sheer athleticism of its clumsiness. It’s like watching Liam Neeson, the solemn priest of revenge thrillers, wander onto a banana peel factory floor—and never finding the exit.
Akiva Schaffer’s latest movie is gag after gag, joke after joke, pratfall piled onto pratfall until you start to wonder if the film has a dare going with itself: How far can we push before the last sane audience member checks out?
For me, the answer was never. Apart from the fact that I had the movie theater all to myself (again!), I stayed, I laughed, and—against all odds—I had fun.
Puns, Semantics, and Childish Pratfalls
The plot, if we can even call it that, is about Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson), son of Leslie Nielsen’s iconic detective, who stumbles into a scheme cooked up by Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a billionaire Bond-villain type with a tech gadget that could spell humanity’s doom. The gadget name? P.L.O.T. Device, just one of the countless puns in the film.
Cane’s plan: wipe out most of humanity, create a playground for the rich, and start society over. If you’re thinking “hasn’t Samuel L. Jackson already tried this in Kingsman?,” the film thinks so too—and it answers with faceplants, musical numbers, and even a jealous threesome with a giant snowman. The plot is pure placeholder, a laundry line for gags so juvenile they make dad jokes sound like Wildean wit.
So why was I laughing? Why, sitting alone in an empty theater, did I find myself giggling like a kid caught sneaking candy?
The secret lies in how serious this film is about not taking itself seriously. Akiva Schaffer directs with the commitment of a man who knows he’s holding a pie destined for your face, and the writers (Schaffer co-wrote the screenplay with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand) double down on idiocy as if it’s their moral duty. The jokes aren’t sly, they’re cannonballs of corniness: semantic wordplay, fumbles that last half a minute too long, and set-ups so groan-worthy they loop back around to being funny.
Comedy Played Straight Is a Gold Mine for Laughs
Comedy sequels have no right to work this well, especially ones that pick up after a 30-year hibernation. But what the filmmakers understand—and what so many reboots forget—is that stupid comedy only lands when it’s treated with complete, almost holy seriousness.
And then there’s Neeson. There’s a peculiar pleasure in watching an actor known for gravitas lean all the way into farce. And watching him channel his particular brand of Taken-era grimness into a rubber-chicken universe is a rare kind of comedy alchemy. Leslie Nielsen was the king of playing it straight; Neeson doesn’t imitate him, but he understands the formula: deliver every line as though Western civilization depends on it, no matter how absurd the words.
When he masquerades as a little schoolgirl prancing inside a bank in the middle of a heist and answers a henchman who asks what the girl wants with “your ass,” he gravels like he’s back as Bryan Mills out for vengeance. Or when he prays for a sign from his father and gets an owl that later dive-bombs the villain with feces, Neeson reacts with the gravity of Oppenheimer reporting on Hiroshima. That’s the magic—seriousness colliding head-on with stupidity until sparks fly.
Pamela Anderson has her share of fun as the film’s love interest who is somehow both self-aware and completely oblivious, and here she leans into the madness with gusto. Paul Walter Hauser turns every reaction shot into a punchline. And CCH Pounder, stern as granite, may be the funniest of the bunch, because she doesn’t appear to be in on the joke at all.
‘The Naked Gun’: A Shamelessly Stupid Comedy That’s Genuinely Fun
What makes The Naked Gun work for me isn’t originality (there isn’t a single scheme here Bond or Austin Powers hasn’t lampooned) but its shamelessness. It never tries to hide that it’s corny, or disguise the fact that most of its humor is closer to a knock-knock joke than a sophisticated zinger. The gags land not because they’re clever but because the movie refuses to let them fail. It keeps going, keeps hammering, until you can’t help but give in.
The Naked Gun isn’t high art—hell, it’s barely coherent. But to quote Pauline Kael, movies are so rarely great art that if we can’t appreciate great trash, why bother? This film is a strong candidate for dumbest of the year, and it also happens to be one of the most purely enjoyable theater trips I’ve had lately. There’s a weird poetry in that contradiction: the movie is built on nothing but nonsense, yet I left feeling lighter than I have after some of the year’s “serious” offerings.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone—God help the viewer who walks in expecting subtlety—but if you surrender to the idiocy, you might discover, as I did, that stupidity can be its own kind of bliss.
A self-described cinephile who can’t stop talking—and writing—about films. Paul also moonlights as ghostwriter and editor for a few memoirs. He currently resides in the Philippines.
