The Naked Gun

The Gravity of Stupidity

For something like twenty years, Liam Neeson has made a second career out of breaking bones and growling threats. He became the patron saint of middle-aged vengeance, the guy whose voice alone meant some European crime ring was about to have a miserable evening. So watching that same giant, stern frame wander into the slapstick chaos of Akiva Schaffer’s *The Naked Gun* reboot is genuinely disorienting. It should be a terrible idea. I went in expecting another joyless act of IP scavenging. Instead, I spent 85 minutes laughing hard enough to feel it in my ribs.



Studio comedies almost never move like this anymore. Most of them seem embarrassed by the idea of being dumb, so they bury the jokes under character growth or layers of self-aware snickering. Schaffer, coming out of the Lonely Island school of cheerful nonsense, has no interest in making stupidity respectable. He takes the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker formula seriously enough to keep it reckless. The whole machine exists to fling puns, background gags, and visual nonsense at you until resistance feels pointless. The plot is basically an excuse to keep the conveyor belt moving: Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson) investigates a murder that points him toward a tech mogul (Danny Huston) with a plan to wipe out humanity using an actual "P.L.O.T. Device."

The movie tells you its wavelength immediately. Once that opening bank heist rolls out a metallic case literally labeled "P.L.O.T. Device"—short for Primordial Law of Toughness—you either relax into the joke or you don't. Schaffer stuffs the frame with side gags and then refuses to underline them. In one interrogation scene, the detectives' coffee cups keep getting bigger from cut to cut until Paul Walter Hauser is practically hiding behind his. No one reacts. The camera doesn't push in. The bit just sits there, trusting you to catch it.



What makes the whole thing hold together is Neeson's refusal to wink. He plays Frank Jr. with the same rigid spine and squinting seriousness he brought to *Taken*. When he says, "Like an idiot's completed jigsaw puzzle, I was framed," he doesn't stretch the line or wait for applause. He says it like a man delivering hard truth in the rain. As Nick Johnston wrote in *Vanyaland*, Neeson is "just so game for everything that Schaffer throws at him, but, like Nielsen, he never ever suggests that he's in on the joke." That's exactly why it works. He isn't standing outside the bit. He is the bit.

Pamela Anderson, meanwhile, turns up as true-crime novelist Beth Davenport and quietly steals half the movie. There’s something a little satisfying about seeing her here after years of being treated by pop culture as if she were a punchline instead of a performer. She knows exactly what mode this is. Where Neeson holds himself like poured concrete, Anderson floats through scenes with relaxed, knowing control, landing ridiculous lines with the ease of a classic femme fatale who understands the assignment.



Not every gag lands cleanly. The movie loses its snap for a stretch in the back half, especially during a long, very odd snowman sequence that feels imported from a much worse comedy. A few jokes hit the floor with a pretty loud thump. But the film has the good sense not to mope about a miss. It just keeps sprinting and throws another absurd image at you before you can dwell on it.

There's something almost medicinal about sitting in a packed theater and hearing people laugh at total nonsense. *The Naked Gun* doesn't want to diagnose modern life or redeem anybody's trauma. It wants to run face-first into a glass door and do it again if needed. Right now, that kind of committed stupidity feels weirdly precious.