The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
★★★
It had been years since I revisited The Naked Gun, and boy, was this a nostalgia trip—straight back to the golden age of absurdist, rapid-fire comedies. As a kid who grew up on Airplane! and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style of slapstick, this movie lived rent-free in my VHS player. But watching it now, decades later and with a slightly more jaded sense of humor (and a teenage daughter nearby), the experience felt a bit… complicated.
Let’s be honest—The Naked Gun is stupid. And it knows it’s stupid. But what surprised me most this time around was how much of the comedy didn’t quite land for me until the final act. That last stretch at the Los Angeles Angels baseball game? Pure, chaotic brilliance. Every joke, every gag, every ridiculous misunderstanding hits its mark with the precision of a Frank Drebin undercover mission gone hilariously wrong. It’s the scene I remembered best from my childhood, and it still holds up—easily the highlight of the film.
Before that, though? It’s a mixed bag. Some jokes are just groan-worthy—not in the “so bad it’s good” way, but more like “how did this make the final cut?” Leslie Nielsen is, of course, an icon of deadpan delivery, and he sells every punchline like he’s quoting Shakespeare. I also found myself enjoying Priscilla Presley’s performance more than I expected—there’s a sincerity to her role that adds just enough grounding to the lunacy.
One thing that definitely caught me off guard: the crudeness of some of the innuendos. This is a PG-13 from 1989. If I had thrown this on with my daughter in the room, I’d be reaching for the remote during several eyebrow-raising moments. The humor occasionally crosses from playful into problematic territory—not uncommon for the era, but worth noting now.
So is The Naked Gun a comedy classic? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s uneven, wildly immature and often ridiculous—but when it’s funny, it’s really funny. And that baseball sequence? It’s worth the price of admission all on its own.
