Hey there, thanks for stopping by for another installment in our 2025 Review Stew! This week I went to the theaters to check out a new release for the blog. A comedy under 90-minutes long? Surely that’s too good to be true…right? Let’s find out as I take a spoiler-free look at…The Naked Gun (2025).
Title: The Naked Gun
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Released: July 22, 2025 (Premiere – United Kingdom)
Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes
Available to watch: In theaters
Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) followed in his father’s footsteps. The son of the legendary Frank Drebin (made famous by Leslie Nielson) is part of the Los Angeles Police Squad and is arguably as reckless, yet effective, on the job as his old man was. It doesn’t take long for us to see why.
Drebin Jr. responds to an armed robbery at a bank and manages to take out a good number of the armed men. However, this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bank heist. As it turns out, tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston) was behind it and wasn’t after money at all. No, Cane was far more interested in stealing the P.L.O.T device from a safe-deposit box.
Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) has had enough of Drebin being a liability to the department. She reassigns him and his partner, Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), and their first case happens to be a fatal car crash. Drebin is quick to rule it a suicide. Though, nothing is as simple as it seems, as the driver, Simon Davenport, was a former software engineer at Edentech. That’s right, the same company run by Richard Cane.
Simon’s sister, Beth (Pamela Anderson) finds it hard to believe that her brother committed suicide. She thinks there is something sinister in the air. While Drebin tells her to stand down, she refuses and is determined to get to the bottom of her brother’s death.
Will Frank Drebin Jr. be able to find a link between Simon Davenport’s death and the P.L.O.T. device?
The Naked Gun (2025) is exactly the type of movie we need in these times.
Everyone in the cast is incredible in their respective roles. Paul Walter Houser is great as always, I love this reemergence of Pamela Anderson that we’re getting, but the real star here is Liam Neeson. He’s built a career off of playing it straight and serious with leading roles in titles such as Rob Roy, Taken, and Schindler’s List. So it was even more surprising and enjoyable to see him let his hair down and have some fun with this role. The bit where he’s questioning Busta Rhymes had my entire theater in absolute tears.
You know what helps an actor have fun on the set of a comedy? A solid script. And boy did the writing team of Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Akiva Schaffer deliver on that front. They managed to cover everything from slapstick comedy to smart humor and everything in-between.
While yes, there are some jokes that land better if you’ve seen the originals, there is still plenty to go around. You can walk into this without ever having seen another Naked Gun title before and still enjoy it.
The Naked Gun (2025) proves that it is still possible to make funny comedies that are under 2-hours long. Even better, it pulls it off in just under 90-minutes. It gets in, makes you laugh, and gets out before anything starts to get stale…especially the coffee.
So, do you plan on seeing The Naked Gun (2025)?
If you’ve already seen it, what did you think of it?
Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below or by reaching out to me on Bluesky!
As always, you can see everything else that I’ve been watching lately by following me over on Letterboxd.