The Naked Gun (2025)

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston

Have I Seen It Before: Nope! Might have seen it in theaters, but time is finite, and certain movies only play at certain theaters. Such is life. Really looked forward to it showing up on Paramount +, though.

Yes, I am ashamed.

Did I Like It: Great comedies surprise you. So, maybe, The Naked Gun isn’t that great. I think any film that dusts off the now ancient joke of lowering a Spirit Halloween sign on a place recently closed is content with somewhat limited ambitions.

Truly awful comedies tend to give you all of their best bits in trailers and clips, hoping that they can paper over deficiencies in hopes of a better-than-expected opening weekend. The OJ joke? It’s there*. The bit with the chili dogs? Check. I even tripped over a clip of an truly odd sequence where Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson) is absolutely inconsolable after Beth (Anderson) accidentally re-connects his TiVo to the internet, thereby expiring a cache of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. I really would have like to come into that bit cold.

And yet, I kind of enjoyed it.

Maybe I was able to be aware that throughout the film I was laughing about as much as I did throughout any of the three Leslie Nielsen-starring original films. Judged by its own standards, this new Naked Gun doesn’t feel like an ill-considered notion, and it entertains plenty. That might have something to do with Neeson in the main role. Like the 1980s rehabilitation of Nielsen from respectable leading-man to the goofiest man who ever lived, bringing the late-stage Neeson action persona into a goofy comedy works. At some point, Ed Helms circled the leading role, and he would have been dreadful, coming originally from comedy as he did. One might yearn for a Jon Hamm, but we already know he’s funny. Let Neeson have his turn.

*Credit where credit is due that they didn’t keep going back to that well, and I might have forgiven them if they had.

Hot Rod (2007)

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Cast: Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher, Jorma Taccone, Bill Hader

Have I Seen It Before?: I have a dim memory of watching it on DVD during some hazy buying jag I went on shortly after the release, and the only thing I can really point to remembering is the “ancestors protect me” chant from earlier in the film, so much so that I could have sworn it appeared throughout the film

Did I like it?: Had the movie come about under its original conception as a Will Ferrell vehicle of the era, it probably wouldn’t have been terribly memorable. Similarly, had it come about later in the storied career of The Lonely Island, people would think that their other films would be better. As it stands, a bland movie about arrested adolescence released in a period where feature comedy was a sea of movies about arrested development, I found myself laughing profoundly at any number of moments. I may be a sucker for non sequitur, and so those moments where the film eschews logic and is content to thumb its nose at its own structure work the best.

I wish those films had been more omnipresent, and I also wish that the filmmakers had been allowed to go deeper with their own voice, as they were with their latest film together, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016).

And yet, it’s sort of a strange miracle that the film exists at all. Lorne Michaels used his influence to give complete creative control to comedic voices that had barely gotten SNL sketches on the air at that point. We often complain how safe that show plays it with material, and while there’s some legitimacy to that criticism, it’s hard to deny that Michaels hasn’t spent some of his show business influence to develop new comedic talent.