The Naked Gun (2025)

PG-13, but that's only by a hair.  If you have any memory of the Leslie Nielsen franchise entries, the point is to push the line of what is considered in questionable taste.  As such, the movie has both sex and sexual innuendo.  There is also a lot of death, but the death is all silly nonsense.  If anything, one consistent trait is that there is a lot of inappropriate stuff, but all done in a lighthearted and intentionally silly tone.  

DIRECTOR: Akiva Schaffer

Guys!  I don't have to write about another horror movie.  I just found out that a horror movie that I was mildly excited about watching just dropped on Netflix and I said, "No, thank you."  I'm in the mood for lighter stuff now.  We actually had a  bit of a discussion in class today for what genre is most appropriate for November.  My argument is that November is for rom-coms.  It's cozy.  It's nice.  We're not fully Christmas, but we're detoxing from the mass death that was Spooky Season.  I don't know.  You tell me.

I have to apologize for this blog, by the way.  I watched The Naked Gun in the least condusive way imaginable.  In fact, it was so bad that it gave me a very specific perspective on the movie.  I watched the first half of the movie three weeks ago and then finished it up two nights ago.  I know!  It's not that long of a movie.  We planned to getting around to it, but then we discovered that our lives are horribly busy and it slipped our minds.  Now, how does this give me insight into a movie like The Naked Gun?  My theory is that comedy is all about circumstance and environment.

I remember watching The Wedding Singer in the theater.  It was packed.  These were in the halcyon days of people actually going out to the cinema in droves, especially when it came to opening nights.  People saw everything and that was heaven.  (Note:  It was in this moment that i realized how much I miss going to the movies, let alone going to the movies regularly.)  Seeing The Wedding Singer with a loud and boisterous audience made that movie seem like the funniest thing that had ever existed.  It was so good that I had to purchase the movie on home video as soon as it was available.  (I don't have a date in my head, so I don't remember if it was VHS or DVD.  I think DVD because I owned that DVD for a while.) But when I watched it at home, by myself, it wasn't all that funny.  If anything, I remember being kind of put off by the movie.  Now, I wasn't sure if it was a matter of having already seen the jokes, the surprise element was gone or if it came down to the fact that I was watching the movie alone that damned the film.  I do believe that film should be a communal experience.  But even more than just film, I do believe that comedy thrives on the symbiotic relationship of the people in the theater.  

When it comes to The Naked Gun, I loved the first half.  My wife and I watched the first half and I found myself giggling throughout.  So was she.  I was surprised.  My wife is a classy lady and The Naked Gun movies have never shied away from their targeted audiences of juvenile men.  But watching it together, we were chuckling pretty hard.  But we started it late and we had to get up.  Three weeks later, I was excited to finish the movie.  I don't think that my wife gave it a second thought.  If anything, she was doing anything that she could to tune the movie out.  She was on her phone and on her laptop throughout the film, so I felt like I was watching it alone.  And, as a result, I thought the second half of the movie wasn't very good.

Now, the odds that Akiva Shaffer made a movie where the first half was comic genius and the second half was unfunny buffoonery can't be accurate.  Instead, I realized that it was most likely the circumstances.  A lot of you are saying, "Of course that's how it works.  That's life."  I'm not a complete moron.  Just a partial one.  The bigger problem is wondering how to approach a film when writing about it when you have so much user baggage determining if something is funny.  It's not like I didn't laugh at all in that second half.  (Although, the snowman scene that everyone talked about made me want to laugh, but that was me trying to meet the movie halfway.) 

Part of what I need to come to grips with is that I miss comedies and the theatrical experience of those comedies.  While there is mounting evidence that movie theaters are dying a prolonged slow death, I don't know how much of that data is subjective or if they actually are dying.  Let's say this: I miss going to the movie theaters.  If I didn't have so many kids and so much responsibility, I would be going to the movies all the time.  The Naked Gun is a movie that needs a packed house to work as well as some of the bits allow.  I refuse to call this movie a "stupid comedy", although my guts desperately want me to.  For a long time, I've held onto the notion that many of the comedies that we dismiss as "stupid" might be some of the smartest writing that is out there.  I'm a guy who laughs going on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disney World.  I find puns and timing to be something that brings me great joy.  From a writing perspective, a lot of The Naked Gun works.  Golly, there are a lot of beautiful cornball jokes in the movie.  

But, then, why do I hate the Scary Movie franchise?  I mean, I kind of liked The Naked Gun.  The Naked Gun, all of the movies, including stuff from Police Squad!, are in the same genre as Scary Movie.  These are all spoof / parody films.  I also liked most of Mel Brooks's canon, especially when I was in high school.  Is it because I'm a snob?  Maybe.  So much of The Naked Gun was me saying, "Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson have no right being this good in this movie."  But I do question whether or not it was their straight talent or if it was the novelty of it all.  That really might be the case for how I'm feeling about the movie.  It does feel like a bit of a novelty to revisit the world of The Naked Gun.  These movies are incredibly silly and have no pretense of being more than what they are presenting.

Maybe that's the frustrating thing when it comes to trying to write about these movies.  I am a different person than I was when Leslie Neeson was my Frank Drebin.  (This very vague and indecisive blog was brought to you by "Subjectivity."  It's what's for YOUR dinner.)  I'm now in a world where I'm looking at all art as something that's meant to change its audience.  For the most part, with the exception of my favorite joke in the movie, the movie is apolotical (which I cannot stress enough, is a form of politics.) While I want more movies like The Naked Gun, I honestly don't see much point in them.  I've probably used this simile dozens of time on this blog in various entries, but this feels like just eating frosting.  There's no substance to The Naked Gun outside the fact that it has some absolutely silly jokes and it seems like I should be happy for Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson.  Every part of this movie is executed to what the director wanted.  There's nothing wrong with the movie.  But I also know that, when my wife stopped watching the movie, I found it unfunny.  That's frustrating because the movie did nothing wrong outside of fail to deliver anything of deep meaning, which was the movie's goal.  

Why do I have to hold The Naked Gun to a standard of quality of a Criterion picture?  There is value to high and low art.  We need low art to appreciate high art.  Similarly, low art has value in itself.  The jokes work, but gosh darn it if 90% of the jokes seem to have dislodged themselves from my brain because they were mostly fine.  I want to like this movie more than I do and that's a huge bummer.