Recent events have made me, like many Americans in 2025, really desperate for a laugh. Naturally, I regarded the new Naked Gun as a potential laugh-bonanza and went to see it immediately.

And I laughed quite a few times, so it was a win. But I was aware all the while that this is pretty mediocre stuff in the realm of all-out, completely silly, utterly shameless and low-down comedy. The new Naked Gun lacks that ruthlessness of the 1988 original — one-liners, puns, parodic references, wall-to-wall sight gags, insane slapstick acrobatics, the whole shmear proudly on display.

But if you like comedy, it’s impossible not to be struck by the ingenious casting in the Naked Gun reboot. No less than Liam Neeson plays the son of bumbling police detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin of the Los Angeles Police Squad, but as a chip-off-the-old-block behaving just like Drebin Sr. That’s the role that finally made minor actor Leslie Nielsen a big star at age sixty-two. How could Neeson possibly compete with the memory of Nielsen’s ridiculous gifts — his earnest, square, deadpan look, and that obtuse, dunderheaded acting style that flourished in the 1950s when the ideal movie man was a big arrogant dope in a suit. Nielsen’s sly, camp spin on all those qualities made him a standout even in that other great Jim Abrahams-Zucker brothers comedy triumph, Airplane! (1980),which put him in competition with his other 1950s has-been peers such as Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves.