The Naked Gun (2025)

The opening moments of The Naked Gun (2025) embrace a silliness that seems to have fallen out of fashion. It feels like a relic from the past. First, the tone is serious, overly-serious, but not quite parody. It embraces the cliches we’ve all come to expect from crime pictures. Bad guys swarm a bank and shout orders at civilians whilst firing guns in the air. Then, a little girl enters the bank… but this is no little girl. It’s Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), who eliminates the robbers in a slapstick number replete with bowling ball strike sound effects as he kicks one faceless goon into a crowd of them and they go careening through the air. Drebin saves the day, but not before one of the robbers breaches a safety deposit box and absconds with a high-tech piece of hardware called the P.L.O.T. Device.

Drebin is also called to investigate an incident where a software engineer appears to have died by suicide, driving his car off a cliff. The victim’s sister, Beth (Pamela Anderson), a writer of true crime books based on fictional stories she made up herself, doesn’t believe it to be true. He wouldn’t have killed himself; that wasn’t like him, and considering the work he was involved in, it’s likely a setup. It doesn’t take long for Drebin to connect the pieces and realize that the two cases he’s working on—the car accident and the bank robbery—are one big case.

Drebin and Beth work together to investigate her brother’s former employer, Richard Cane (Danny Huston), an Elon Musk-esque tech billionaire who believes his inventions and investments are for the improvement of mankind. The P.L.O.T. Device acronym is revealed to mean "Primordial Law Of Toughness" and is used to cause violence and mayhem in people, making them fight to a bloody death. The survivors of this technological evil will be deemed superior beings and will be ushered along into a new, beautiful era of Darwinism gone mad.

I’ve long been a fan of The Naked Gun movies and the TV show from which they’re adapted, From the Files of Police Squad! I grew up watching these ridiculous, stupid movies and loved them to death. Akiva Schaffer directed Hot Rod, a movie I adored for similar reasons, due to its complete and utter dedication to being pure entertainment. I saw Hot Rod on a first date with a girl who, unbeknownst to me, hated it—hated every minute of it. And while I laughed and laughed, she got madder and madder. It did not work out between us. Meanwhile, I own Hot Rod on DVD and rewatch it every few years with my wife, who also loves it, so we've all made our choices.

The new Naked Gun is a great entry into the franchise. Liam Neeson, as Frank Drebin Jr., is a silly joke because his name is so similar to Leslie Nielsen’s. Neeson has the comedic chops for it and is game for everything the story throws his way, whether he’s masochistically giving himself diarrhea each day with a chili dog breakfast, or entering a thruple with a demonically possessed snowman. But Pamela Anderson matches his performance, particularly in an extended sequence in which she free-style skats along with a jazz band. It’s an inspired bit of lunacy that only works because of her dedication to it. What could have been what the kids today refer to as “cringe” is instead one of the funniest scenes in a film loaded with them.

The Naked Gun is the movie that America needed at this time. It doesn’t matter what your political affiliation is; it’s hard to deny that things are tough right now. It’s contentious. And sometimes we need to watch a movie that allows us to turn off our brains. If anything can bridge the gap between such polarized ideologies, it’s the power of laughter.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
From the files of Police Squad comes the Naked Gun reboot, on Blu-ray, in a single-disc release. The single disc is housed in a standard case with a removable slipcover, containing identical artwork on both. Inside the case is a code for digital redemption.

The Naked Gun was shot digitally by cinematographer Brandon Trost in an exaggerated fashion that lampoons different genres from different eras throughout film history. And while each of these looks is meant to be a parody, in their over-the-top nature, they tend to look like the most beautiful, aggrandized version possible. The opening sequence, set during a bank robbery, is flooded with golden lighting bathing the scene and its subjects in a flattering hue. Later scenes, where Liam Neeson narrates the action like a hard-nosed detective in a noir, moody shadows through slits in Venetian blinds are cast across the actors’ faces. And there’s a boardroom scene that looks straight out of Minority Report, riffing on the Y2K Futurism aesthetic lensed by Janusz Kaminski. Overall, The Naked Gun looks about as good as a Blu-ray possibly can, presented in 1080p high definition, with a crystal-clear picture and razor-sharp focus.

The joy in The Naked Gun is that anything can be used for a joke is used for a joke, and that extends to its sound design, which includes a very fun Dolby Atmos mix. While it’s not wall-to-wall effects pinging from front, to rear, to height, it does have some well-timed and well-placed effects that are maximized through its object-based nature. A scene where Officer Drebin accidentally feeds a corpse’s head into a ceiling fan pipes in cleanly and loudly through the height channels, echoing through the front and rear of the soundstage. The dramatic musical score utilizes the satellite speakers to wonderful effect. Through all the madness and mayhem of the plot, dialogue is given priority and is always audible, even in the movie’s loudest moments.

The Naked Gun packs a full clip when it comes to its supplemental features, a nice change of pace for a newer movie, which generally tend to skew toward a more scant offering. Here, we have deleted scenes and a number of featurettes that give a look into the film’s production.

• A Legacy of Laughter (HD 8:57)
• Son of a (Naked) Gun (HD 5:59)
• The Really Unusual Suspects (HD 4:22)
• On Set of a Set Within a Set That’s in a Set (HD 3:42)
• Dropping the Balls (HD 3:26)
• Outtakes (HD 12:28)
• Deleted/Extended/Alternate Scenes (HD 16:32)

The Naked Gun is hilarious. It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Life is unpredictable, as of late, with political turmoil and polarization tearing people apart. And while it may sound corny (and maybe it is corny), perhaps there’s hope in the future if we can share some laughter in a darkened theater together. The Blu-ray looks and sounds amazing, with a ton of supplemental features to make your way through. We do hope to cover the 4K eventually, but for now, consider this Blu-ray of The Naked Gun Highly Recommended.