Review: The Naked Gun (2025) (Patreon)

It's nice to see the return of PG-13, adolescent-friendly comedies. Barbie ushered in something good, and it wasn't an age of quality toy line movies. Kids are getting to see slightly edgy comedies on the big screen again — nothing shocking, but just enough to give them that little thrill of having watched a "grown-up" movie with some dirty jokes. It's a healthy part of any adolescence. Let's hope we get more of these.

The Naked Gun gives us plenty of dirty jokes. But more importantly, it has elaborately stupid jokes. There's a scene involving a pair of infrared binoculars that made me laugh so hard I worried I'd injured myself. A different, protracted scene which involved a snowman had the same effect. And Liam Neeson throws himself into the stupidity with a wry-quasi-comedic performance that fighting a bunch of bank robbers in a schoolgirl's outfit calls for. Perhaps best of all, The Naked Gun doesn't wring its hands too much about being a legacy sequel. It's perfectly content to operate in the same style as the original movie with a few updates.

Living up to the legacy of the original Naked Gun is no easy job. How do you follow the Citizen Kane of movies? Hand it to one of the Lonely Island guys, replace Priscilla Presley with Pamela Anderson, swap out Ricardo Montalban for Danny Houston, and make a solid joke about O.J. Simpson. The right things are amped up — Frank Drebin Jr. is an even more violent and appreciably more corrupt cop than his dad (he does things in this movie that would disgust Harry Callahan — and they're very funny). The political undertones are slightly clunkier than the original's — you know they're not going to kill off the Elon Musk stand-in. And you've definitely got some "more Black female prison guards" energy here. But there is also the beaver. I rest my case. I laughed, I cried, and then I got off the toilet and watched the movie.