August 11, 2025 – Hollywood provides us with very few effective comedies. Fortunately“The Naked Gun” is one of the few good ones. It is smart, silly, and really funny. This is the fourth film in the Naked Gun franchise, dating back almost 40 years to the last millennium, an ancient time when the late O.J. Simpson was still a Hollywood star.

This new Naked Gun movie relentlessly makes fun of Hollywood cop dramas and comedies, including other Naked Gun movies. The movie opens with a bank robbery in which the real target is not money, but a mysterious gadget. On the back of the gadget, it is labeled “plot device,” just in case there are those in the audience who don't know what a MacGuffin is.

Frank Drebin Junior (played by Liam Neeson of the “Taken” movies) shows up right away, disguised as a little girl, armed only with a lollipop, who single-handedly takes out most of the bank robbers. Drebin is a lot like his father (who was played by the late Leslie Nielsen in the previous Naked Gun movies). Neeson and Nielsen have something in common. They both were serious actors before going into absurdist comedy (Nielsen was the very serious original 1956 Captain Kirk in “Forbidden Planet.”

This sequel to “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” features a number of Police Squad characters who were sons of characters in earlier Naked Gun movies, like Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (played by Paul Walter Hauser of “Richard Jewell” ). Hocken's father in earlier Naked Gun films was played by the late George Kennedy of “Cool Hand Luke” fame.

It might seem unlikely that Liam Neeson would be a good fit for such a silly movie, given the serious dramas he has starred in lately, but then actors have to play it straight to make comedy like this work. Neeson does just that, and is very effective as Frank Drebin Junior, who is a bit like an American version of Inspector Clouseau, bumbling his way to solving crimes.

The bad guy, Richard Cane, is played by Danny Huston of “Angel Has Fallen”) who is no stranger to bad guy roles. In this movie he is like a comedic Bond villain. As one would expect, Drebin's path to solving the case is a twisted one, and there is a pretty woman, too. Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson of “The Last Showgirl”) insists on getting involved in the case. Pamela really shines in this movie as the wife of a murder victim who is determined to find her husband's killer, and Drebin's hilarious lover.

This movie is solidly in the tradition of the absurdist comedy Zucker-Abrahams films, like “Airplane,” “BASEketball,” Scary Movie and earlier Naked Gun films. This kind of try-anything-to-make-you-laugh comedy is not easy to get right, but this movie has just the right tone. It is a combination of good writing, good acting, effective slapstick comedy and clever movie industry inside jokes. It rates a B.

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