The Naked Gun (2025)
When I was 13 I saw the 1988 film The Naked Gun on a 12-inch TV/VCR in my parents’ garage. My friend and I were watching it for the first time, and he started laughing at O.J. Simpson’s name during the opening credits. I had to spend the rest of the credits trying to convince him that that wasn’t a joke, O.J. Simpson was actually acting in this film, and that it was made before the murders. 22 years later, I watched the 2025 film The Naked Gun in a decently packed West Philly theater. When the film cuts to an old photo of O.J. Simpson the whole audience laughed. I then explained to my friend, who hadn’t seen the original, that that was a joke because O.J. Simpson was, in fact, in the 1988 film.
This joke in Akiva Schaffer’s film is one of the few direct nods to the original. And while it’s one of a thousand funny jokes in the movie, it also helps elevate the movie above your average franchise reboot. We’re living in an era of legacy sequels and remakes which often fall into one of two camps. There are movies like 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which treats the 1984 comedy as an important, sacred text. A movie where a ghost sucks Dan Aykroyd’s dick is turned into hallowed American mythology. On the other hand, you have something like the Jurassic World series, which is built on the foundational idea that a park full of dinosaurs would be boring, actually— reboots that are so determined to poke holes in the original that it makes one wonder why the filmmakers wanted to reboot it in the first place.
The 2025 Naked Gun’s O.J. joke sits in the middle of both these camps. In the scene, Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) kneels in front of a photo of his deceased father Frank Drebin Sr. (The late, great Leslie Nielsen’s character in the original), and prays that he’ll be as good a cop as his dad was. We then cut to a wide shot revealing a wall full of photos, each of a character from the original, and each one being prayed to. There’s a genuine sense of love and admiration of the original film at the heart of this gag, but it's cranked up to such a degree that it highlights the absurdity of taking an 80s spoof movie so seriously.
But this joke does require some familiarity with the original Naked Gun trilogy, and is absolutely in the spirit of those films. There’s a reason that my jr. high friend thought the O.J. credit was a joke. These are movies that constantly comment on and call attention to themselves. Any sense of reality, internal logic, character, or continuity is sacrificed in service of the next joke. Making a joke at the original film’s expense, then, is really just continuing in this tradition. This is why the 2025 Naked Gun is in the rarified company of reboots that deserve to be in the same conversation as the original. It’s right up there with Mad Max: Fury Road, and, um… Mad Max: Fury Road-Black And Chrome Edition.
Now, I realize that I’ve spent a lot of time on a single joke without even mentioning the story. And, frankly, it’s because the story doesn’t matter. And to be clear, that’s not a slight against the movie. The movie agrees that the story doesn’t matter and wants you to know it doesn’t matter right away. The opening scene has a bad guy stealing an item literally labeled “P.L.O.T. Device.” It’s just jokes, people, don’t worry about it.
That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have things on its mind. The villain is a billionaire, there are multiple jokes about police violence and corruption, and LA’s Crypto.com Arena is renamed the Ponzi-Scheme.com arena. But these feel less like political messages and more like liberal minded filmmakers making jokes about the world in 2025. It’s like how the cold open of the 1988 film has Leslie Nielsen putting Mikhail Gorbachev in a headlock. One could read that as signaling director David Zucker’s conservative leanings, but it would be a stretch to use that joke as evidence for any coherent ideological point of view in the film. Because, as I’ve said before, these movies will forgo anything in service of the joke. And in all honesty it would be doing a disservice to this movie, and to you, to try and make it more than it is: silly dumb bullshit that’ll make you laugh for 90 minutes straight.