Having premiered in theaters to near universal praise, Liam Neeson’s The Naked Gun has met many people’s expectations as a reboot of Leslie Nielsen’s iconic comedy film franchise of the same name. In true Naked Gun fashion, the new movie sees Neeson playing the buffoonish Frank Drebin
This legacy sequel effectively replicates many of the elements that made the first Naked Gun movie so funny and beloved. Nevertheless, the film that started the entire franchise still retains some key qualities lacking in the reboot, still making it the best Naked Gun movie ever made.
2025’s The Naked Gun thrives thanks to the leadership of two of modern comedy’s brightest minds, director Akiva Schaffer (Saturday Night Live) and producer Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy). Thanks to them, the new Naked Gun provides viewers with a large, steady supply of clever comedy. The movie even revitalizes many of the original’s best running gags (i.e., Frank’s comedic voice-overs, his bad driving, and the characters misunderstanding each other’s dialogue).
However, the original Naked Gun film is packed with even more hilarious surprises and jokes. There were some bits of comedy in the reboot that seemed a little too drawn out. There were also times where another joke could’ve been squeezed in.
In its first few minutes, the new Naked Gun film broke a beloved tradition of the franchise by not featuring a new version of its classic opening credits sequence. The first three Naked Gun movies would open with a police car driving through the city and all sorts of bizarre settings, including a roller coaster, a water slide, a women’s locker room, and even a T-Rex pen at Jurassic Park.
This gag has become one of the most popular trademarks of the franchise, so it seemed like the reboot would’ve kept it going. Though the reboot does reuse the first film’s opening credits sequence at the end, it doesn’t add anything new to this running gag. It seems to appear there only to invoke the audience’s nostalgia.
Overall, it seems like the reboot missed the opportunity to create some incredible new laughs by bringing back this iconic gag. At least we still have Stewie’s homage to this sequence in Family Guy.
The Naked Gun reboot sets itself apart from previous films by having its story take place in 2020s America. It’s tailored for a specific era, given the inclusion of the Internet and electric cars in the narrative.
While the original Naked Gun is set in the 1980s, there is a timeless aura to its story and humor that still appeals to modern audiences. The story hardly feels old-fashioned, and the jokes haven’t aged a day. Though the world’s opinion of star O.J. Simpson has changed a lot, it’s even more hilarious and enjoyable to see him getting hurt left and right as Officer Nordberg.
Nothing beats composer Ira Newborn’s musical score for the 1988 film. Whenever one hears the trumpets and saxophone play in the film’s music, they would immediately know they were listening to the sounds of the original Naked Gun.
Meanwhile, the reboot doesn’t draw from the franchise’s iconic score until the end credits start to roll. Though this also helps the new film distinguish itself from its predecessor, the score ends up being far less memorable. On the plus side, Neeson does record a hilarious, rambling love song to Pamela Anderson’s character, which audiences can hear during the credits.
Liam Neeson did a fantastic job playing the role of Frank Drebin’s son in the Naked Gun reboot. The actor gives a hysterical performance thanks to his deadpan delivery and his character’s dimwitted antics, which successfully invoke Nielsen’s own character from the original Naked Gun movies.
However, Nielsen still carries an “everyman” aura that makes his character even more hilarious and compelling. Neeson is well known for portraying vengeful, ultraviolent action heroes in movies like Taken, and that persona shines through in his performance as Frank Drebin Jr.
In the end, Schaffer and MacFarlane’s The Naked Gun did a fine job forging its own identity as a comedy film while living up to its predecessors. The reboot features an excellent brand of comedy and quick wit that should appeal to veteran Naked Gun fans, as well as newcomers to the franchise. The movie doesn’t reach the high caliber of the first Naked Gun, but it still sets a very good example for the franchise going forward.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?