THE NAKED GUN (2025)

This is the hard kind of review to write, because the movie is actually funny. Four stars, per our own rating — a fast, absurd spoof of 1980s and '90s cop movies, played dead straight by its cast, with a moral spine most comedies skip entirely: justice wins, and the hero talks his girlfriend out of revenge instead of cheering her into it.

But two scenes tip the whole thing over. A run of explicit visual jokes simulates oral sex and bestiality, and a comic occult ritual animates a snowman with what the film treats as a demonic spirit. Add strong comical violence and a dozen-plus profanities, and the content simply outweighs the craft.

Funny is not the same as fine for your family. Skip it, and watch something else together instead.

Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the legendarily bumbling detective, in this legacy sequel to the 1988 comedy classic. His gung-ho police tactics keep landing his department in lawsuits — and his boss's patience runs thin.

Then a case of a man's apparent suicide turns into something bigger: a dead man's sister who's convinced it was murder, and a scheme by a billionaire who wants to unleash chaos on humanity to seize power for himself and his rich friends. That's where we'll leave it.

Four stars means this genuinely works as comedy, and here's why. Instead of rehashing the original's spoof of 1960s and '70s TV detective shows, the filmmaking team — the trio behind Disney's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers — retools the formula to spoof 1980s and '90s cop franchises like Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop. The gag engine is the same one that made the originals classics: absurd situations, played with total sincerity by the cast. A running joke about someone constantly handing Frank cups of coffee — including a disembodied hand through a car window — lands because nobody on screen acknowledges how strange it is.

The pacing has a few slow patches, but mostly the jokes come fast. It's a well-made spoof. The two extreme scenes are what keep it from being a movie we can recommend.

Underneath the gags, this film has a stronger moral center than most comedies bother with. Justice overcomes the villain's greed by the end, and in a key moment, the hero talks his girlfriend out of killing the man who murdered her brother — revenge, he tells her, never actually works out the way you think it will. The film also spoofs both "woke" excess and the billionaires and institutions it satirizes elsewhere, landing its punches in more than one direction.

That moral seriousness sits inside a "strong but mixed pagan worldview," as our content analysis puts it. The clearest example is a comic sequence where the hero and his girlfriend perform an occult ritual from a book of spells to bring a snowman to life — the snowman becomes possessed, turns jealous and dangerous, and has to be beheaded to stop it. Played for laughs, yes, but occult practice treated as harmless fun is still occult practice, and Scripture doesn't share the joke.

The film's better instinct — that revenge devours the avenger, and that mercy is the stronger move — is one the Bible states plainly: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God" (Romans 12:19). That's a truth worth keeping, even from a movie you should otherwise pass on.

This one's a genuine shame, because the comedy works — fast, silly, and better-hearted than you'd expect from a spoof sequel. But two scenes push the content past what we can recommend, no matter how many laughs surround them. Our answer is the same one we opened with: skip it. Looking for something to watch together instead? Start with our latest.