The Naked Gun review: Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson get the daftness needed to make reboot work

Spoof movies have been out of vogue for close to 20 years, done in by the Scary Movie and Not Another Movie franchises of the early 2000s and the fact that, thanks to Marvel’s dominance, so much mainstream cinema already deconstructs itself now there’s almost nothing left to parody.

Perhaps that’s why a running gag in The Naked Gun reboot has Liam Neeson dropping pop culture references that are 20 years out of date. Just as horror movies sometimes have to contrive ways to explain why their characters’ smartphones don’t work, this has to locate at least some of its humour in a pre-meta era.

That also makes some of the jokes seem a little tired out of the gate, yet there’s fun to be had once Neeson settles into the silliness of a series defined by the late, great Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan delivery and slapstick prowess.

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Cast as the son of Nielsen’s heroically incompetent police lieutenant Frank Drebin, Neeson’s all in playing Frank Drebin Jr, an idiot cop longing for the old days of Police Squad when middle-aged white guys could act with impunity and cancellation was something that only happened to failing TV shows.

In this iteration, Frank Jr accidentally finds himself facing off against a tech billionaire (Danny Houston) with a dastardly plan to wipe out humanity, something that lets the film puncture some of the pomposity of the more recent Mission: Impossible movies (not to mention Neeson’s own Taken franchise) while simultaneously sending up the indistinguishable world-ending plots of the average blockbuster, with deviations into Looney Tunes-style cartoon violence and goofball raunchiness.

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Regarding the latter, comeback queen Pamela Anderson proves good value as Frank’s romantic foil, and the rest of the supporting cast – among them Paul Walter Hauser – certainly understand the levels of daftness required. Whether audiences unfamiliar with the originals will find it funny, though, is anyone’s guess.