In the Flesh: The Naked Gun (2025)

Every single moment of The Naked Gun, and I mean this in the most complimentary sense, is stupid. Every bit is more moronic than the last, a relentless onslaught of idiocy so overwhelming it feels like getting battered by thirty-foot breakers in a storm at sea. Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) saying “no thanks, I have plenty of chairs at home” in response to Frank Drebin Jr’s (Liam Neeson) invitation for her to take a seat, her stone-faced declaration that she writes “true crime novels based on fake stories I make up”, the constant coffee gags, the “fish people” digression during Richard Cane’s (Danny Huston) villainous speech, the overlapping noir monologues as the cops at Drebin’s precinct as they watch Beth walk away — it never lets up. The sound effects during Frank’s attempt to sneak past Cane’s guards alone are backbreaking.

In an era when the studio comedy is largely a dead medium, it’s a true joy to watch Pamela Anderson frantically scat for her life to the point where she simply starts yipping and howling like a wounded animal. Danny Huston’s intermittent clapping and shouts of “Yeah, yeah!” and “Wonderful!” as the performance stretches out are a perfect deployment of one of Hollywood’s born straight men, a feat gamely matched by both CCH Pounder’s tough, harried police chief  with her perpetually asleep husband and Neeson himself, who takes his hard-bitten tough guy image and drags it mewling and farting through the gutter for an hour and a half. Anderson is tremendous in her own right, a noir dame par excellence. 

In any other movie, Frank and Beth’s back and forth about Frank’s late wife — “How did she pass?” “Fifty yards, easy. Arm like a cannon. Then she died, so we’ll never know if she could have gone pro.” — would be a showcase joke. Here it’s just one in a constant flurry of knockout punches, handily overshadowed within minutes by a protracted montage in which Frank and Beth accidentally animate a snowman while on vacation, take him as their lover, erotically eat parts of his body, grow tired of him, evade his murderous rampage after jealousy drives him to kill, and finally chop him in half and melt his remains in a hot tub. About the harshest thing I can say about The Naked Gun is that the always excellent Paul Walter Hauser is a little short-changed by the script, but even he gets to brutally judo throw a child into a vending machine. No matter how you slice it, Akiva Schaffer’s return to the classic comedy franchise is a resounding success and one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.