‘The Naked Gun’: Maybe Liam Neeson Can Save Comedy Too

Forgive me for saying this, however Liam Neeson has been in a couple of very foolish motion pictures. I refer to not the precise comedies he’s popped up in however to the legion of motion movies he’s churned out nonstop over the previous 20 years—every seemingly extra perfunctory and high-concept than the final. The actor has growled melodramatic traces, brandished a gun, and handled assorted faceless unhealthy guys in an airplane and in an ice-road truck, and even whereas trapped inside a parked automobile. His on-screen tough-guy persona is so ubiquitous and over-the-top that within the new comedy The Bare Gun, it barely requires any calibration to be humorous.The unique Bare Gun movies, in addition to the TV present, Police Squad!, that impressed them, have been rooted in the identical comedic spin. They starred Leslie Nielsen, who was often known as a dramatic actor earlier than his flip within the movie Airplane! established him as a grasp of spoof comedy. Nielsen performed the bumbling LAPD lieutenant Frank Drebin with sincerity, making the absurdity round him all of the funnier. Neeson is smart as Nielsen’s successor: the stone-faced hero squinting on the silliest stuff conceivable.The goofiness of 2025’s The Bare Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer, is very pleasing within the present cinematic panorama. Amid the everyday clamor of summer time blockbusters, an out-and-out farce is like an oasis within the desert. Comedies was a significant a part of the moviegoing world, and I proceed to be baffled that movies stuffed with ridiculous gags and one-liners are nearly not possible to seek out in theaters today. Laughing together with a crowd is a wonderful, irreproducible expertise, but Hollywood appears to have shifted its priorities towards pumping out action-adventure motion pictures—a style hardly recognized for its humor.Learn: The world doesn’t need Hollywood comediesAlthough not fairly as transcendent as its forebears, the brand new Bare Gun manages to offer the inane enjoyable I’ve been lacking. The action-inflected comedy retains the ensemble tight: Neeson performs Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr.—a macho, trigger-happy presence on the pressure who’s by no means and not using a cup of espresso. (An off-screen determine even passes one to him by means of his automobile window whereas he’s driving on the freeway.) The supporting forged contains the well-meaning Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (performed by an affably dim Paul Walter Hauser), the grumpy Chief Davis (CCH Pounder), and a femme-fatale kind named Beth (Pamela Anderson), who enters Drebin’s world to request that he examine her brother’s dying.The film judders from one set piece to a different with solely a unfastened plot to comply with—the story includes some useless our bodies, an evil billionaire (Danny Huston), and a budding romance between Drebin and Beth. Everybody performs it reliably straight, a distinction that helps the movie keep its zany power—and, within the spirit of the unique trilogy, maximize the variety of jokes per minute. If one bit flops, one other arrives in a couple of seconds to make up for it.The Bare Gun’s dedication to that ethereal sense of pointlessness is refreshing. Schaffer’s most notable long-form work thus far might be Popstar: By no means Cease By no means Stopping, a scrappy collaboration along with his associates and former Saturday Evening Dwell collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, a.okay.a. the Lonely Island; the film skewered music biopics with cheerful, vulgar aplomb. Popstar was largely ignored by most theatergoers, but it surely turned a near-instant cult basic amongst comedy diehards. Now Schaffer is making an attempt to sneak the identical high-grade, unadulterated enjoyable into a significant movement image, with a steely Neeson as its guise. By attaching his farce to the face of a few of Hollywood’s greatest motion motion pictures, the director is playing that it’ll draw a wider viewers.Learn: Lengthy reside the delightfully dumb comedyThe world wants extra comedies, and the sillier the higher. The Bare Gun is glad to ship loads of chortles, together with some wild swings which are simply slapsticky sufficient to work. (A sequence that includes a sentient snowman defies straightforward description.) I’m rooting for its success within the hope that it brings some style variety to the silver display—not simply motion motion pictures with jokes, however motion motion pictures which are a joke.