2025’s Naked Gun Aims for Laughs and Legacy

Fans of bawdy humor and outlandish parody comedies have been waiting 30 years for the sound of cotton balls hitting shins and exasperated, drawn-out “YES!” es. That’s right: The Naked Gun, the long-running spoof franchise about a hapless yet earnest detective, is returning to theaters on August 1, 2025.

No, it’s not Leslie Nielsen back in action, but Liam Neeson will be playing the late Frank Drebin’s son in the “legacy sequel.” Drebin was Nielsen’s much-beloved character in the franchise that began with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988. Following that film’s success, two sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994), were made.

As it goes for many satirical crime-comedies, The Naked Gun started as a parody TV show: Police Squad! It aired for one season in 1972 but found a cult audience on cable TV and VHS in the ’80s, leading to a feature-film spinoff with Nielsen reprising the title role. The original Naked Gun, as it would be known, made use of classic over-the-top, screwball-crime comedy, with Drebin defusing an assassination plot to kill Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the United States. Audiences loved it: The film’s success gave birth to the series, including two sequels mentioned above.

In the first sequel, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, Drebin and his department try to foil a plan to kidnap and replace a top nuclear scientist with a double. Then, in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, Drebin comes out of retirement to investigate a bomb plot by The Society of Independent Creators to blow up the Academy Awards.

After the third film, the franchise went dark for more than two decades. First, there was a potential reboot in 2013 with Paramount Pictures. Ed Helms, a Comedy Central alum from The Office, was in line to play a Drebin who had no relation to Frank Drebin’s character. But that film never materialized, in part because creator, writer, and director David Zucker, one of the producers of the first two Naked Gun films, refused to participate in that project. “A reboot is inferior, so if you’re rebooting something, it’s already second rate,” Zucker had said about the script. In 2017, however, he briefly rejoined the franchise by reworking a script in which Drebin’s son was a secret agent. That version never went anywhere, either.

It wasn’t until 2021 that the project was revived again, with Seth MacFarlane on board, and with no Zucker involvement. That’s when Liam Neeson, who will play Drebin’s son, Frank Drebin Jr., was cast as the police lieutenant carrying on his father’s crime-fighting legacy.

New Faces in Old Places

Neison will be joined in the film by Paul Walter Hauser as Captain Ed Hocken, Jr., son of Drebin Sr.’s longtime partner in crime and comedy, Captain Ed Hocken. Hauser is set to play Mole Man in the upcoming Fantastic Four: First Steps. Pamela Anderson is a blonde bombshell cast as Beth, the femme fatale whose brother has been murdered, which is the key plot point that sets in motion the events that Drebin must sort out. Other cast members include Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, Liza Koshy, Cody Rhodes, CCH Pounder, Busta Rhymes, and Eddy Yu.

After a much-anticipated teaser trailer was released in April, responses were mixed, with David Zucker, again a fierce and vocal protector of the original Naked Gun franchise, saying that watching the teaser left him with no regrets but with a strong desire, “I can’t unsee it.” However, on the bright side for fans, it seems like Liam Neeson is indeed going to dive right into the franchise’s screwball energy, making fun of his own husky “special set of skills” voice used in the Taken films. There’s a shot of him in the trailer, for example, shouting, “Once you kill a man for revenge, there’s no going back.” With that, Neeson as Drebin then proceeds to tear off a man’s arms and stab the assailant with them, before flatly narrating, “A voice in your head saying over and over, ‘That was awesome.’”

There are also some touching homages to the original films and characters. As one would expect, Frank and Ed Jr. break down emotionally at some points while reading the commemorative plaques that honor their late fathers, a touching tribute to the Police Squad legacy.

And that’s not all. No, this is The Naked Gun, after all, and it has a plot. At least, there’s a premise undergirding all those jokes (some good, some bad, some forgettable, and all very much on-the-nose). It involves Beth’s murder and Drebin Jr. agreeing to solve it for Beth. If he can’t do it in 48 hours, the Police Squad is going to be closed. Why is it so urgent? One of the suspects claims he got 20 years in prison “for man’s laughter.” When Drebin Jr. corrects him that it was “manslaughter,” he sardonically comments, “Must have been quite the joke.”

When Frank commandeers a bathroom stall in a coffee shop to explain to Beth that “all the connections I have are just being used for police business right now,” it all seems fairly typical of the franchise and what fans have always loved about it. Neeson is more than game for this role, it seems, and it will be fascinating to watch him wearing (or falling out of) that badge.

The comedy may not be to everyone’s taste. The jokes are big, corny, often pun-filled, and dreadfully cheesy. But fans of the original Naked Gun films adored this kind of stuff in the ’80s and ’90s, and that hasn’t changed much for most of them over the last three decades. Based on the trailer, The Naked Gun 2025 could be poised to bring much of that same mindless, nostalgic fun just in time for summer.