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Liam Neeson Draws an Impeccable Deadpan for a New Naked Gun

By Jesse Hassenger  |  July 30, 2025 | 9:00am
Movies Reviews akiva schaffer
Liam Neeson Draws an Impeccable Deadpan for a New Naked Gun
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The 1982 ABC series Police Squad! was much-lamented for lasting a mere six episodes, given the axe despite being one of the funniest shows on the air. Yet could Police Squad! have been expected to sustain itself much longer? David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, the creators of Airplane!, constructed a deadpan parody of old police procedurals so packed with jokes that a full 24-episode season would have required hundreds if not thousands of puns, sight gags, non sequiturs, and other high-low forms of humor. Yes, the defunct series went on to inspire a trilogy of hit movies, also starring Leslie Nielsen as the intrepid and dimwitted cop Frank Drebin, but those, too, demanded a high density of jokes; spaced three years apart, the movies were each roughly the length of three and a half Police Squad! episodes. (They re-use some of the show’s jokes, too.) By even the very funny first film, Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and Nielsen were padding the laughs by breaking a little, allowing Nielsen to do mugging takes to the camera from more or less scene one.

In that sense, The Naked Gun, a sequel/remake/revival of the film series, returns to the basics of the series. Liam Neeson, taking the role of Frank Drebin Jr., may mug ever so lightly in the film’s more outlandish situations, and you can catch him turning to the camera once, maybe twice. But while delivering some of the silliest jokes possible, he maintains what Nielsen had in Airplane! and Police Squad! and in the best moments of the Naked Gun movies: a stone face of absolute seriousness. He’s earned it, throughout his storied career of commanding dramatic performances, commanding supporting performances as the hero’s mentor, and pulp thrillers where he literally commands people to return his daughter or wife or what-have-you, or else.

Some serious actors make self-parody mode seem like, well, self-parody. For every ruthless bit of Robert De Niro comic business, like the first Meet the Parents, there are two or three embarrassments, like however many sequels Meet the Parents winds up inspiring. (A fourth installment is coming soon.) Neeson, though, shouldn’t have any trouble toggling between Drebin and his more legitimately anguished roles. He is hilarious in The Naked Gun, not least when he’s allowed to get irrationally angry or mournful about something trivial. (At one point, Drebin grimly recalls losing his temper when thinking about the Janet Jackson Super Bowl.) Yet the mechanics are not so different from his serious performances: He plays Drebin with absolute conviction, albeit somewhat less Catholic guilt. Nielsen was a treasure, but by the end of the ’90s he was playing spoofy material in a different, zanier, Mel Brooks-ier key. (No surprise he starred in Dracula: Dead and Loving It.) Neeson has done comic cameos before, taking advantage of his broguish deadpan; here, he masters the form.

Director Akiva Schaffer, who co-wrote the movie with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, also seems more firmly committed to the idea of parody, even if the movie wobbles a little when it comes to what, precisely, it’s meant to be parodying. The earlier Naked Gun movies, funny as they are, are caught somewhere between the old cop-show parody of Police Squad! and a grab bag of more then-contemporary reference points. (There are hints of gung-ho American jingoism action that Abrahams would go on to spoof via his Hot Shots! series, and David Zucker would weirdly embrace in his unsuccessful late-career makeover as a post-9/11 reactionary.) The original films expertly pick apart all manner of verbal and visual clichés without particularly resembling cop movies of their era.

Schaffer’s Naked Gun is admittedly also a bit of a mish-mash. It’s not narrow enough to specifically take down Neeson’s Taken-era action movies; at the same time, the 2020s barely have enough big-tent cop movies broad enough to recognizably spoof. So the opening does a sly imitation of the Dark Knight bank robbery complete with imitation-Zimmer score from Rolfe Kent, and the thin story about a Musk-y tech billionaire (Danny Huston) developing a device (its high-tech acronym is, yes, P.L.O.T.) to sow brave-new-world chaos is like something out of a smaller-scale superhero story, all while maintaining a bit of the noir narration and conventions that the original movies borrowed, which passed for semi-contemporary in the 1980s and early ’90s because of the prevalence of neo-noir erotic thrillers. Got all that?

Visually, though, Schaffer does a great job making the new Naked Gun look like a contemporary noir-adjacent thriller, bathed in icy blues and grays, with fights playing out in grimy industrial spaces. It’s just believable enough that when Schaffer slowly builds up a running gag about Drebin and his partner Ed (Paul Walter Hauser, playing the son of George Kennedy’s character from the originals) constantly being handed successive cups of coffee, it takes a little while for the bit to sink in. (Rest assured that it is repeated long after every single audience member has caught up, offering the whole separate satisfaction of a gag that never stops running.) The jokes don’t slow down for applause; despite Schaffer’s Saturday Night Live connections as one third of the Digital Short maestros the Lonely Island, there no major comedy-world cameos cueing the audience that it’s time to laugh in recognition. (Even the scene-specific parodies that increasingly dotted ’90s-era spoofs are scarce here.) Instead, the movie has Pamela Anderson beautifully matching Neeson’s deadpan as a potential femme fatale with a heart of gold. You may guess what she does when Drebin offers her a chair. Sometimes the anticipation of a dumb joke is as funny as the payoff.

Though Anderson follows in the tradition of Priscilla Presley in the earlier films, the 2025 version of The Naked Gun isn’t pure tribute-band throwback. There are some passages where Schaffer indulges his Lonely Island penchant for ridiculous tangents, including one lengthy and insane sequence that I mistook for a romantic reverie in Frank’s head, only to realize it actually takes place in the world of the movie. These moments go further than the increasing cartooniness that came to dominate the later-period ZAZ style, but they’re imprinted with Schaffer’s specific brand of absurdism, enough so that you might wish Anderson, Hauser, and Huston were all granted a little more side material. There’s also a little actual satire where the earlier films mostly settled for “ironic” political caricature: This Drebin, more aware of his status as an older man in a newfangled world, obliviously fights for his iron grip on the culture, all from an insulated cop-world vantage. He’s old school, but not in the way that he thinks. Cop-supremacy pulp may be hard to revive with a straight face; the laugh-a-minute spoof, though, is momentarily and gloriously back.

Director: Akiva Schaffer
Writers: Akiva Schaffer, David Gregor, Doug Mand
Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder
Release Date: August 1, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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