The spoof movie is probably a lost art that we’ll never truly see revived again, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t still going to give it the occasional try. The likes of Airplane! and Top Secret! are still beloved by comedy geeks, and equally revered is the series that so many people still fondly remember Leslie Nielsen for decades later: The Naked Gun. Nielsen made the third and final entry in the original series of police spoofs back in 1994, but more than 30 years later we have a new oddity to add to the canon: The Naked Gun‘s very own reboot and legacy sequel, starring Liam Neeson. The film is directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer (Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) and produced by Seth MacFarlane, currently ticketed for an Aug. 1, 2025 release date in theaters. The first trailer was just released, which you can view below to drink in the full sight of the 72-year-old Neeson, dressed as a school girl, taking on a bank full of armed assailants with a lollipop.
Neeson does seem to be the fitting choice for the job, given his lengthy action movie resume, especially considering that it was a late-career jump to being an action icon: Neeson was mostly known as a world-class dramatic actor until 2008’s Taken sent him down the easy-to-make, very profitable action rabbit hole for the last two decades. This is almost akin to Nielsen’s own career arc, as Nielsen was primarily known as a dramatic actor until his scene-stealing turn as the doctor in 1980’s Airplane! made him into a comedy icon for the last few decades of his career. Neeson, meanwhile, is literally playing the son of Nielsen’s hero cop Frank Drebin, putting The Naked Gun–sharing the same title as the original–firmly into legacy sequel territory.
Looking at the footage below, it looks like something of a mixed bag. The opening action scene doesn’t do much for us, feeling deeply derivative and familiar, its humor all riding on dressing up Neeson as a schoolgirl. The following bit, however, with every single member of the reconstituted Police Squad all being the children of their dead fathers from the original film … well, that does feel quite a bit like a vintage Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker joke, and it’s enough to salvage some of our optimism for The Naked Gun. At the very least, you know that Neeson will give it 110%. Here’s hoping they can find a way to update the absurd and sometimes crass style of humor in a way that still makes audiences chortle, decades later. In the meantime, check out the first trailer for The Naked Gun below.
