The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
★★★ — The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
There is a particular kind of comedy that refuses to take anything seriously, not the plot, not the characters, not even itself, and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is one of the more successful examples of exactly that. Released by Paramount Pictures in 1988, the film follows Lieutenant Frank Drebin, a cheerfully oblivious Los Angeles police detective whose investigation into the shooting of his partner leads him, via a series of disasters he barely registers, toward a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II during a visit to the United States. It is the sort of premise that works only if everyone involved commits to it with a straight face, which, to their considerable credit, they do.
The film arrived out of a short-lived television series, Police Squad!, which ran for just six episodes on ABC in 1982 before being cancelled. The series had its admirers, but it was this feature-length adaptation that found the wider audience the format deserved. Behind the camera was David Zucker, who had already demonstrated his appetite for relentless, joke-per-minute comedy with Airplane! earlier that decade. Zucker brought much the same approach here: an avalanche of visual gags, puns, and background jokes running alongside the main action, the kind of filmmaking where you could watch the same scene three times and notice something new each time. Paramount, backing a relatively modest production built around a cast of familiar faces rather than any particular spectacle, gave Zucker the room to do what he does best.
The cast assembled is a polished but unremarkable ensemble that happens to include one genuinely perfect piece of casting. Leslie Nielsen, who spent decades playing reliable dramatic parts in films and television before his comedic reinvention with Airplane!, is Frank Drebin here, and the fit is seamless. His particular gift is for delivering the most ludicrous lines with the gravity of a man reading a weather report, which is precisely the engine that makes spoof comedy of this kind run. Alongside him, Priscilla Presley plays his love interest with an admirably game quality, while Ricardo Montalban provides a smoothly watchable villain. George Kennedy and O. J. Simpson round out the central ensemble, each playing things just seriously enough to keep the comedy grounded in its own absurd logic. For those who enjoy this flavour of genre parody, it sits in a broader tradition of smart-dumb filmmaking that Zucker would return to with BASEketball a decade later.
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) is a slapstick farce that trades heavily on absurdity, visual gags, and the deadpan charm of Leslie Nielsen as the blissfully incompetent Detective Frank Drebin. Spun off from the short-lived TV series Police Squad!, the film leans into its own ridiculousness with gleeful abandon, whether it’s Drebin accidentally destroying an entire baseball stadium or delivering stone-faced one-liners while chaos erupts around him. There’s no attempt at realism, logic, or coherence; instead, it’s a rapid-fire barrage of puns, sight gags, and non sequiturs that rarely pause for breath. It’s funny in places (often very funny) with standout sequences like the iconic stadium scene or the disastrously polite dinner party showcasing the teams mastery of comedic timing. Nielsen is perfectly cast, his straight-man delivery selling even the dumbest jokes, and the supporting cast (including Priscilla Presley and O.J. Simpson) plays it just seriously enough to make the absurdity pop. The film knows exactly what it is: a live-action cartoon with zero stakes and maximum silliness. That said, it doesn’t quite reach the anarchic brilliance of Airplane! (1980). The plot feels thinner, the gags slightly more repetitive, and the pacing occasionally drags between set pieces. Where Airplane! layered jokes so densely you needed multiple viewings to catch them all, The Naked Gun often settles for broader, simpler humour, more pratfalls than wordplay. It’s a solid, frequently hilarious comedy that launched a beloved franchise. If you love vintage spoof cinema and don’t mind a few groaners between the laughs, it’s well worth a watch. Just don’t expect it to land every punchline.
So where does that leave me? Broadly speaking, in a good mood, which is not nothing. The Naked Gun is the kind of film I find genuinely difficult to be hard on, even when I can see the seams. Yes, some of the gags land with a thud rather than a bang, and yes, the middle stretch loses a little momentum, but there is enough here to make the 86 minutes pass very pleasantly indeed. Nielsen alone is worth the time. I have sat through plenty of crime comedies that tried much harder and achieved considerably less, as my look at A Bittersweet Life would suggest. The Naked Gun does not try to be anything other than what it is, and for the most part, that is enough. Sometimes a film just wants to make you laugh. This one mostly does.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1988 | Watched: 2026-05-06
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from David Zucker: Airplane! (1980) · BASEketball (1998)
More with Leslie Nielsen: Airplane! (1980)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
