'The Naked Gun' does stupid correctly

Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker existed in the wake of Mel Brooks, and before him a long line of slapstick and wordplay legends tracing their lineage up the Borscht Belt to the Catskills, to the Marx Brothers, Vaudeville, Oscar Wilde's bons mots and beyond. But ZAZ, in just a handful of works in the late 1970s and 1980s – writers of The Kentucky Fried Movie, and then the powers behind Airplane!, the Police Squad television show, Top Secret! and the three original Naked Gun Films (shockingly, they were not involved in any way with Airplane II) – created and nearly immediately perfected the spoof-slapstick genre.

Jim Abrahams would helm the two Hot Shots! films, both worthy successors in the same realm, and David Zucker would turn in the equally perfect BASEketball prior to all three being relegated to a smattering Scary Movie sequels and similar ilk, quietly fading into the background as they saw the genre they sired wither and then grow fallow as Friedberg and Seltzer wrote Spy Hard and the first Scary Movie and then turned in a slew of creatively bankrupt barely-a-parody parodies like Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and others. By the end of their run of having studios throw money at them to put together a collection of references, I have heard tell that the movies devolved (not that they had far to go) to being an assembly of callbacks to popular movies, with no jokes to be found within.

So here we are, some ten full years removed from the final Friedberg/Seltzer offering, with the only real successor to the ZAZ routine in that time being the TBS comedy Angie Tribeca, created by Steve and Nancy Carell. The Naked Gun trilogy, the film versions of the short-lived Police Squad! show starring Leslie Nielsen, have introduced multiple generations to double entendre, background gags, and the perfectly-aged slapstick stylings of O.J. Simpson. The first installment (if not necessarily the next two, although they're quite good and occasionally reach the heights of the first) is widely regarded as iconic, and was formative for a great many comedians, writers and directors working in the entertainment business today. A sequel-slash-reboot of The Naked Gun has long been gestating, with a fourth film with Nielsn being announced in 2009 before a reboot starring Ed Helms was greenlit in 2013.

Honestly, we're lucky we never got those versions, because the new, 2025 version of The Naked Gun is about as close to a perfect continuation of the franchise that we could have hoped for. This is largely due to the involvement of director ad co-writer Akiva Schaffer, one-third of The Lonely Island, and someone who has for the better part of two decades been slavishly dedicated to taking one joke, bit, or gag, and creating the best, biggest, most well-made version of that stupidity that he possibly can. This was as true of the videos he directed for "Dick in a Box," "Lazy Sunday," and "Motherlover" as it was for his and Andy Samberg's Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience (a rap musical about Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco), and the movies Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and the extremely underrated Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. Schaffer has made a career out of blowing up the dumbest little thing, which makes him uniquely qualified (perhaps overqualified) to breathe The Naked Gun back to life.

I recently rewatched the first three Naked Gun movies in preparation for this new one, and the major thing that struck me was just how much of the comedy is derived from Nielsen just reacting to things. The notable part of the first Naked Gun films (and pretty much all of Nielsen's spoof repertoire that followed) is the sheer amount of jokes crammed into the sparse runtimes of the films. But my biggest laughs this time around came from Nielsen just looking around after a gag or pratfall landed, or something exploded or fell apart. Nielson's cop, Frank Drebin, is a buffoon, but there's still so much of the comedy derived by him being baffled, taken aback, or confused by some bit of business. To everyone's immense credit, Liam Neeson (taking over the lead role of The Naked Gun as Frank Drebin Jr.) doesn't play the same character as his storyline dad; his cop is a hard-boiled dunce who plays deadpan to the hilt and leaves the piss-takes to his onscreen partner, played by Paul Walter Hauser, or his love interest, played by the wonderful Pamela Anderson.

Anyone surprised at Neeson's comedy chops must have never seen The Lego Movie, but it's a spectacular entree into a third (fourth?) act after the past couple decades having been spent doing aged-badass geezer teasers after the runaway success of the Taken franchise. (It's also lovely that he and Anderson appear to have fallen in love at some point during the filming of this movie in which they played love interests.)

The new Naked Gun lives up to the original, and then some. It's performing well at the box office and earning rave reviews, so here's hoping that Schaffer, Neeson et al are tapped for more in the future. At the very least, this movie is hard proof that spoof and slapstick are still viable genres, but the key variable here is that the people making the movie have to give a shit. More than that, they have to commit to the bit. They have to want to make these jokes, and they have to insist that all of the jokes worth putting in the movie are worth making sure they're actually produced like a real movie; one with writers and directors and cast and crew, all working towards making something worthwhile, and not just a collection of references because they can't trust their audience enough to laugh at something stupid.

Because when something stupid is made as well as it possibly can be, it's just as valid as something smart. And we all deserve to be able to laugh at something stupid once in a while. God knows we've earned it.