Introduction
The main attraction of spoofs and parodies is that they make fun of something popular or familiar. Think about the most famous spoofs. Every one of them has an explicit target. Scary Movie aims at Scream. Austin Powers made fun of James Bond and spy movies. Mel Brooks went after westerns (Blazing Saddles), Star Wars (Spaceballs), and Robin Hood (Robin Hood: Men in Tights). Even the original The Naked Gun was in on it, roasting cop shows and cop movies that were everywhere at the time.
All of these movies worked because they rib the current zeitgeist of their time. Not so with this new The Naked Gun. Instead of spoofing current events and current pop culture, it spoofs…itself. In other words, The Naked Gun (2025) is spoofing The Naked Gun (1988).
I’ll admit that it’s entirely possible I missed some jokes about current stuff. I don’t doom scroll on social media, and I haven’t watched scripted network or cable television shows in years. I also stopped watching cop shows after Castle went off the air in 2016. But I do watch a ton of movies and streaming shows and read a lot of news. I’m not completely ignorant of the world around me.
I also brought my thirteen-year-old son, who knows about social media stuff and other stuff from his generation. I knew he would laugh at the plethora of puns, dirty jokes, and physical comedy. He’s part of the target audience, and he’s also a thirteen-year-old boy. I laughed at the same stuff when I was his age. But he summed up this movie quite well after it was over when he said, “I didn’t get a lot of the jokes.”
Synopsis
That’s not to say many of the jokes were too subtle or layered for him – or any thirteen- year-old – to understand. It’s that those jokes were based on things that happened decades ago. For example, there’s a decent bit where all of the cops in the precinct are talking to pictures of their deceased cop-parents hanging on the wall.
This includes the main character Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) talking to a picture of Frank Sr. (Leslie Nielsen). Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) talks to a picture of Ed Sr. (George Kennedy). And Fred Nordberg Jr. talks to a picture of Fred Sr. (O.J. Simpson).
My son had never actually seen the original The Naked Gun film, and also did not know what O.J. Simpson looked like. So the entire bit went completely over his head. To be fair, that O.J. bit works, even in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLguU7WLreA
But what about when Drebin laments still being upset about Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show? Or Drebin bonding with another character over the Black Eyed Peas (the musical group) or love interest Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) scatting in a jazz club? Or Weird Al Yankovic making a cameo as himself? None of those have been culturally relevant for at least fifteen years. And scatting? Just…no.
Further Analysis
In addition to not mining anything current for laughs, the film also refuses to mine jokes from anything that Neeson and Anderson are famous for. Considering all of the decades-old callbacks, it’s weird that they didn’t also do a Baywatch joke, a Schindler’s List joke, a Playboy joke, or a Taken joke. My son wouldn’t have gotten those jokes either, but he would have laughed at something like, say, Paul Walter Hauser wearing a too-small lifeguard swimsuit while rescuing his ransomed daughter.
But it’s not all bad news, depending on your sense of humor. The best way to describe the comedy in this film is stupid. Some of it is ‘bad’ stupid (I cannot stress enough how unfunny and cringy it was to watch Anderson scat), but most of it is just silly stupid or gross stupid. There is a gag involving bad chili dogs. A gag involving owl poop. There is a sequence of sexual innuendo gags. There’s a running gag where people keep handing Neeson cups of coffee.
There is pun after pun after pun after pun. If you laugh at such exchanges as “I went to school here…Oh really? UCLA?…Yes, I see LA every day. I live here,” or “You really can’t fight city hall…No, you can’t. It’s a building,” then you are going to bust a gut watching this movie. I went into this movie knowing it was going to be stupid, and I was not disappointed.
Conclusion
Since I like silly, stupid, and gross, and am also old enough to remember why the O.J. joke is so funny, I laughed at a decent amount of The Naked Gun. However, I would have laughed much harder and much more often if this movie hadn’t felt like it was made twenty years ago. And so would my son.
Rating: Ask for two and a half or thirty-three and a third back. Gen X and Boomers know what I mean.
Read more Cinema Scholars reviews:
The Making of DRACULA (1931) Click Here
Our Top Ten List of Stephen King Film Adaptations! Click Here
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