Frank Drebin rides again – but the laughs don’t last

AMONG its other attributes, the 1980 movie Airplane! was responsible for a pioneering pop-culture discovery: that non-comic actors playing it straight in a comedy could be insanely funny.

- TY BURR

Leslie Nielsen, up until then known as a stone-faced dramatic actor, was the prime beneficiary, parlaying his Airplane! turn as Dr Rumack into an entire second career as a deadpan farceur in TV’s Police Squad! and three Naked Gun movie spin-offs.

Those projects were spoofs of 1970s police shows with Mad Magazine sight gags and Pink Panther, style slapstick, all cultural references that are sadly out of date in 2025.

Do we need a belated third sequel to The Naked Gun, then, or this it just a case of nostalgia squared? Regardless, we've got one and it's extremely funny until it isn’t.

The director is Akiva Schaffer, part of Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island comedy crew who has since branched out to movies such as 2016's Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Tim Robinson's TV sketch comedy I Think You Should Leave.

More important, the star is Liam Neeson, for whom The Naked Gun is the latest curlicue in a proper pig’s tail of a career.

From an Oscar nomination for playing a Holocaust saviour in Schindler’s List to his reinvention in the new millennium as a sour-faced B-movie action star to filling Nielsen’s police-issue brogans as Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Neeson has never stooped to conquer but, rather, has striven to bring the material up to his level.