The Naked Gun Returns in 2025: Everything to Know About the Classic Comedy Franchise

Frank Drebin Returns: The Naked Gun Rides Again

On August 1, 2025, the most gloriously incompetent detective in movie history walked back onto a screen, played this time by Liam Neeson as the son of the original Frank Drebin. The Naked Gun spoof franchise, dormant since the mid nineties, is back. First, a reminder of why the old ones still hold up.

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A Quick Crash Course: What Is The Naked Gun?

The films grew out of Police Squad!, a cop show ABC canceled after six episodes for allegedly asking too much attention of viewers. Creators David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, the ZAZ trio, brought the format to theaters in 1988 around Frank Drebin, a detective who solves every case by accident while wrecking everything in his path. The formula never changes: play it dead straight, and stuff sight gags into the background so densely one viewing barely catches half of them.

The OG Trilogy Breakdown

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

Nielsen's Drebin unravels a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II during a Los Angeles state visit, engineered by a businessman with an illegal operation to protect. Nobody remembers that plot. What people remember is Drebin working undercover as an umpire at a real Angels game, butchering the anthem, dancing through the seventh-inning stretch, and wrecking the game from the inside while nobody notices. It was a sleeper hit that earned back its budget many times over and set up two sequels. If you've never seen it, the original is easy to find on Amazon and worth the rewatch for that ballgame scene alone.

The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)

This one swaps foreign intrigue for an oil-and-coal conspiracy. Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet, playing smug and slick) wants a cabinet post and needs the country hooked on oil, coal, and nuclear power, so he sabotages the clean-energy proposals on the table and plots to blow up the summit meant to unveil them. Drebin, now dating Jane (Priscilla Presley), stumbles through it while trying for something like a normal relationship, which the film turns into its own joke: the love scenes play entirely as stock-footage metaphor, fireworks, a train roaring into a tunnel, a dig at how old Hollywood used to fake its way around a sex scene. It also has one of the franchise's best exchanges: "That's the red-light district. I wonder why Savage is hanging around down there." "Sex, Frank?" "Uh, no, not right now, Ed." That stretch alone makes it worth tracking down, and the sequel is streaming on Amazon if you want to catch it before the new one.

The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994)

Peter Segal directed this one, sending a retired Drebin undercover in prison to stop a bombing planned for the Academy Awards. It's the shaggiest entry, a slow setup that pays off with a mock Oscars ceremony stuffed with celebrity cameos, including a quick, deadpan bit from "Weird Al" Yankovic. One piece of trivia trails it everywhere: it opened in early 1994, and within months its co-star O.J. Simpson, who plays Nordberg across all three films, became the subject of the most-covered murder trial of the decade, a footnote with nothing to do with the movie itself. Trivia aside, the mock Oscars bit is worth seeing on its own, and you can watch it on Amazon whenever the mood strikes.

Jokes So Dumb, They're Genius

A few bits that still hold up. The first film opens on a cold gag unrelated to the plot: Drebin, undercover in a room of lookalike strongmen and Cold War villains, beats up the whole meeting and walks out before the credits finish. There's the moment Nielsen spots a mounted beaver on an apartment wall and deadpans "Nice beaver"; the woman thanks him, and he never breaks character, which is the joke. And there's how all three films end: mid-action, on a frozen tableau of the cast in some absurd pose while the credits roll over it, a device borrowed from Police Squad!, which closed every episode the same way so you never saw how the case got solved.

Two lines that still land cold:

"Nothing to see here!"

"Like a midget at a urinal, I was going to have to stay on my toes."

Who's in the New Naked Gun?

Leslie Nielsen died in 2010, so there was never a version of this reboot that could just put him back in the suit. Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. instead, inheriting his father's badge and his father's total inability to notice when the room is on fire. Pamela Anderson is the co-lead, playing the woman who gets pulled into the case, in the tradition of Priscilla Presley's Jane: someone who looks like a suspect and ends up falling for the idiot detective anyway. Akiva Schaffer directs, the same director behind Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Hot Rod, proof he can hold a joke past where most directors would cut away. Seth MacFarlane produces, which tracks given his career runs on the same anything-for-a-laugh instinct ZAZ built this franchise on.

Will It Be Any Good?

Neeson has spent a decade building toward this without seeming to try, playing the most self-serious action hero around in the Taken movies while just as easily undercutting that reputation for a laugh, see his cameo in Ted 2 or the loose comic timing in A Million Ways to Die in the West. That's the entire Drebin job: deliver the most absurd line like it's a eulogy. Schaffer and MacFarlane both came up on this kind of comedy rather than discovering it later, and spoof humor dies the moment it winks at the audience instead of playing everything straight. No trailer can settle whether the finished film clears that bar, but the appetite is real: the crowd that still quotes Airplane! decades later never left, it just hasn't had anywhere new to spend its money.

Mark Your Calendar

The reboot opened in theaters on August 1, 2025. Go in expecting the exact rhythm of the '80s and '90s films: played straight, no irony, gags stacked into every corner of the frame, and you'll know inside five minutes whether Schaffer and Neeson pulled it off. Since it's already out, you can watch The Naked Gun on Amazon and see for yourself.

Final Words from Frank Drebin (Probably)

"Like a blind man at an orgy, I was going to have to feel my way through."

That's the whole Drebin method: dead-serious tone, ridiculous line, never once letting on that you know it's funny. Whether Neeson can pull that off in 2025 is the only question that matters, and no trailer can answer it for you.