Zucker Not Impressed by Trailer, But Fans Might Be

It’s taken three decades of crickets, but the world is about to be inundated once again with the unspeakably bad puns of slapstick sleuthing. The Naked Gun, the bonkers spoof comedy franchise that followed a gaggle of incompetent detectives as they stumbled over one another in an all-out war on crime, is officially returning. The new film, a “legacy sequel” starring Liam Neeson, will release on August 1, 2025, according to a new announcement from Universal.

Instead of Leslie Nielsen, the Naked Gun franchise will follow Neeson’s character, the late Frank Drebin’s son, as he solves crimes and regularly misuses his badge in all new ways. The announcement arrives with a video trailer showing off some of the film’s concepts, gags, and a veritable laundry list of guest stars.

A Smell of Fear

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, released in 1988, featured Nielsen as the goonish Frank Drebin. Drebin and a group of mismatched police officers and civilians (best remembered through Rick Moranis’s ill-fated FBI agent Ned Jacobson) try to foil an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth II as she visits the United States. After some highly improbable twists, Drebin sacrifices himself to protect the queen, and the day is saved.

The original film became a touchstone crime-comedy, and two sequels followed. In The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), Drebin has to stop a plot to kidnap a nuclear scientist at the next-to-last stop of a cross-country tour. In 1994, Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, Drebin is out of retirement to avenge his fellow officers’ murders by stopping a bomb plot at the Academy Awards.

From there, the franchise fizzled. Reboot ideas for Drebin in the hands of other actors were kicked around over the years, the most notable being from 2013. That time, Paramount sought to reboot the franchise with an Ed Helms-led cast, going so far as to cast the Office star as a “Frank Drebin, no relation.” The film, which Zucker tried to keep at arm’s length by not participating and calling any reboot of the franchise “inferior,” never took off.

A 2017 update on the Drebin estate saga found Zucker dipping his toe back into the nonsense, briefly rewriting a film in which Drebin’s son was a secret agent. No film has come of that version either. Drebin, Jr. was back on the table in 2021 after Seth MacFarlane stepped up to direct without Zucker involved in the proceedings, and it was then that Liam Neeson got his chance to be a sleuth for the first time in the Naked Gun 2025 reboot. The role of Drebin Jr., also known as Lt. Frank Drebin III, fits Neeson like a glove—he’s a police lieutenant who appears to have the same knack for tripping and diving his way out of sticky situations in typically inept ways as his late father.

A Police of New Faces

Paul Walter Hauser (Captain Ed Hocken, Jr.) is Drebin Jr.’s partner and the son of Drebin Sr.’s partner, Captain Ed Hocken, Jr. Hauser, who will play the Mole Man in the new Fantastic Four: First Steps later this year, is joined by Pamela Anderson as Beth, a classic Femme Fatale, and Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, Liza Koshy, Cody Rhodes, CCH Pounder, Busta Rhymes, and Eddy Yu, among others.

The first teaser trailer dropped in April and was received rather mixed. David Zucker did the obligatory “I shouldn’t have watched it” commentary to TMZ, calling the experience “traumatic” and adding, “I can’t unsee it.” But to be fair, Zucker has a lot to live up to, and Neeson more than delivers in the trailer with copious self-parody, channeling his comically taciturn “I have a very particular set of skills” Taken character into the bargain. In one notable sequence from the trailer, he bellows to a bad guy in Drebin’s loft, “Once you kill a man for revenge, there’s no going back!” before tearing off the aggressor’s arms and battering him with them. “A voice in your head saying over and over, ‘That was awesome,’” he says, grinning to the camera.

He’s not the only Drebin family member getting misty-eyed about The Naked Gun either, as Frank and Ed Jr. break down in front of commemorative plaques honoring their respective fathers.

Throw a Bomb in There

Despite all this emotion, however, one might be forgiven for wondering how, exactly, Drebin Jr. plans on solving his mystery. The mystery itself, while integral to the film’s setup, has largely been a means to an end for the three previous Naked Gun films. The specific one at the center of this film involves Beth (Anderson) killing her brother, and Drebin Jr. coming to solve the mystery of said murder, or else the entire Police Squad will be disbanded. One prospect calls it a police state, Drebin Jr. says, to which another replies, “It would be a really small one.”

In other words, don’t expect a heavy focus on plot, and, if the trailer is anything to go by, expect references galore. In addition to the Frank Sr. tributes already mentioned, many Easter eggs are dropped in the early minutes of the trailer. That includes Drebin Jr. storming into a coffee shop bathroom to finish “police business” (complete with coffee stain outline where he was sitting), as well as a now-customary barrage of Running Gags, some of which return from the original trilogy, including one suspect Drebin accuses of serving 20 years for “man’s laughter.” When corrected that the crime was “manslaughter,” Drebin replies, dryly, “Must have been quite the joke.”

In the Naked Gun films, The Plot is almost secondary to the Jokes, and it’s a reassuring sign to see that held as true in this movie as it was in the originals. It’s a foregone conclusion in a new Naked Gun that you’re not going to be getting a serious whodunnit with subtlety or nuance; it’s going to be broad, punny, lazily referential, and stupid in the best ways. What better way to return to a form of comedy that had all but faded from view before resurging in culture over the last decade?

Naked Gun 2025 is in theaters August 1.