The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
★★★ — The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
There's a moment in The Naked Gun where Detective Frank Drebin, oblivious to everything collapsing around him, delivers a line so magnificently stupid that you can't help but laugh even as you're rolling your eyes. That tension, somewhere between admiration and mild frustration, pretty much sums up my experience with this one. It's funny. It's often very funny. But it's not quite the comedy classic its reputation occasionally suggests.
Leslie Nielsen is the beating heart of all of it. What makes him work so brilliantly here is the same thing that made him great in Airplane!: total, unshakeable commitment. Drebin never winks at the camera. He never lets you know he's in on the joke. He plays every scene with the gravity of a man defusing a bomb, even when he's accidentally broadcasting his toilet trip to a packed stadium over a live microphone. That straight-faced sincerity is what transforms even the dumbest gag into something genuinely disarming.
The supporting cast holds up their end of the bargain too. Priscilla Presley is a good sport throughout, and the rest of the ensemble understand the assignment: play it completely straight and let the absurdity do the work. The comedy here is a live-action cartoon, and everyone's in on the logic of that world, even if none of the characters would ever admit the world is cartoonish.
The standout sequences are genuinely brilliant. The stadium scene is one of the great set pieces in spoof cinema, a sustained escalation of chaos that keeps topping itself. The dinner party sequence has a beautiful, almost musical quality to its comic timing. When this film is firing, it really fires. There's craft behind the silliness, and the best moments show a team who understood that farce, done properly, is harder than it looks.
But here's where I have to be honest: it doesn't sustain that level throughout. Compared to Airplane!, the gag density is noticeably thinner. That film layers jokes so relentlessly that repeat viewings keep turning up things you missed the first three times. The Naked Gun goes broader and simpler. More pratfalls, fewer wordplay ambushes. There's nothing wrong with that as a choice, but it does mean the film occasionally idles between its bigger set pieces, waiting for the next good idea to arrive. The plot, such as it is, is essentially a coat hanger for gags rather than a narrative that generates its own comic momentum.
Some of the jokes haven't aged brilliantly either, and a few of them landed with a thud even by the standards of 1988 spoof comedy. You take the rough with the smooth in this genre, but The Naked Gun has more rough patches than I'd remembered going back to it.
Three stars. It's a solid, frequently hilarious piece of work that absolutely earns its cult status and launched a franchise for good reason. Nielsen alone makes it worth your time. Just go in knowing it's a very good spoof rather than an untouchable one, and you'll have a great time with it.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1988 | Watched: 2026-05-06
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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)
