A Thought on the Franchise
The Naked Gun (2025) – A Thought on the Franchise
Dear readers,
Much is in the works! My husband and I are launching a website to host all of our public scholarly works in one place/ This project is an idea we’ve been tossing around for a while to collate our various works into one convenient spot, but it’s happening now because we’ve seen a lot of stuff on Substack that makes us uncomfortable being here and bringing traffic to the space. So, this week has been a busy one with a bit of traveling to family, a bit of web development, and a lot of reading Frankenstein (for an unrelated project – don’t worry, you’ll hear about that too in time).
But, for my husband’s birthday, we did see The Naked Gun (2025) to finish out the franchise binge, so I thought this week, instead of a normal review, we’d think about the franchise as a whole and what value the reboot might contribute to it. Also because I didn’t have time to watch a 20th century film. But so we beat on.
The Naked Gun 33 ⅓ (1994) was terrible. I really disliked it. After the first was so smartly developed with every joke being the pinnacle of dramatic beats, and the second was so thoughtfully focused on its environmentalist message with comedy and humor thematically aligned, the third one just felt so lazy. The jokes were also extremely topical in a way the other films didn’t rely on, so the timelessness of a lot of the jokes in the first two is just not present in the third one. It also made obvious jokes and sex, gender, and race that were so on the nose as to just be lazy attempts at offensive humor rather than thoughtful social critiques through humor that the first two get so right a lot of the time. Those obvious jokes also cheapened the characters that had been built over two films, and in particular throwaway jokes about Leslie Nielsen cheating on Priscilla Presley only amounted to serious detriment to their hard-fought relationship for a cheap laugh. All in all, it was a big disappointment as the follow up to the second film that checked all the boxes for me. But, I wouldn’t put it past them to have known what an obvious, lazy let down it was, as they did subtitle it The Final Insult.
So, the original trilogy ended in a grave insult to the fans, which is normally how reboots start, but I think Akiva Schaffer really delivered on this one. I enjoyed Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson so much in this film that it scrubbed away all memory of Anna Nicole Smith’s terrible acting in 33 ⅓. Anderson was so eager to play the fool that she found the perfect balance of funny sexy humility at the heart of Presley’s precedent. Neeson had delivery down pat, and I think he really stepped into Nielsen’s shoes while maintaining his own original take, separating them enough as father and son.
Though, I was a little on the fence about how much they allowed action star Liam Neeson into the film in which his character is supposed to be a bit bumbling. There are moments when the action star is about to come out – tapping into audience association with seeing Liam Neeson on screen – that are then undercut with humor, showing the real strength of Schaffer and his writing team to play with the audience’s expectations (something I talked about in my review of the first film). In other places, the action star is definitively present, though, which raises an interesting question about both Frank Drebins. In the first film, Nielsen’s Drebin is like a white middle-aged Simone Biles gracefully flipping around his apartment for comedic effect, a joke repeated by his son in the reboot. If we take these seriously, then are both Frank Drebins actually masterminds of manipulation? Are they not the clumsy fools they portend to be, instead capable of extreme control over their bodies and minds? Is the action star in Neeson’s Drebin a betrayal of Nielsen’s carefully constructed public persona as a bumbling officer that distracts from his keen intellect for police work? Or was it all just a stipulation in Neeson’s contract that he be allowed to kick limited ass for funsies? We may never know.
I think this film was also a really perfect continuation of the first two in that it had those completely random, absolutely riotously funny jokes that had nothing to do with anything – as in the first film – but also a thoughtful political and social commentary – as in the second. The villain is an obvious stand-in for a person we are all too damn familiar with right now, and some might call this film obvious in its approach, but that’s only because that person it’s based on is so obviously mockable. If he were more interesting, the critiques of him would be too, but unfortunately for comedians everywhere, the dumbest, least creative, most predictable jackasses are running our world right now, so jokes at their expense can largely seem as unoriginal as they are. Schaffer, however, introduces an interesting bend to the character whose modern marvels are a front for a nostalgic past that never existed, which is excellent political commentary on the buffoons in power who believe their self-proclaimed “alpha” status would equate to historical domination in their invented past, but really would result in a quick, decisive domination by literally anyone else.
Overall, this reboot is, in my opinion, hugely successful at paying homage but holding its own. The call backs are handled deftly, and any echoes of jokes from the original or other ZAZ productions are purposefully referenced, not merely recycled. I think the worst sequel I’ve ever seen for recycled humor was Anchorman 2, so much so that I now compare every reboot or sequel to its soulless lack of joy, and I think The Naked Gun is at least a Mission: Impossible 5 away from Anchorman 2, if not a Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith or an MCU 17 (Thor: Ragnarok).
If you get the chance to see it, I highly recommend a cinema trip. It’s a fun film to see on a big screen, and one to definitely see without spoilers of the film’s funniest sequences that, thankfully, have not been spoiled by the trailers.
Leave a Reply