Surely/Shirley Hollywood can’t be serious that the gag-a-minute spoof comedy genre is brazenly dropping trou into our collective consciousness again, and Akiva Schaffer’s 2025 legacy sequel The Naked Gun (B-) is mostly crackling, cackling kindling on the formula fire. More effective than imagined in the lead role playing against type, Liam Neeson is dreamy deadpan. He plays the son of Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen in the original film trilogy and short-lived Police Squad! TV show) who must succeed in his father’s footsteps to prevent a tech billionaire baddie played by Danny Huston from achieving mass mind control over L.A. society. The parade of sassy sight gags and plentiful plays on words play out with feckless abandon in a tidy hour and a half laugh-fest. Pamela Anderson is an absolute joy as a bombshell novelist, who gets to effectively ham it up in jazz speakeasies and an absurdist alpine adventure. Paul Walter Hauser is also funny as the straight man to the straight man as the dad jokes play out one after another. Co-screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand milk every laugh they can get out of the action and antics, with clear inspiration from the comic classics and undeniable nifty notes from goofball producer Seth MacFarlane. The film is often giddily retrograde, with knowing knock knocks centered around such novelties as TiVo devices, the Black-Eyed Peas, mobile phones, body cams and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer catalogue deep-cuts. Sometimes viewers will see the joke coming from a mile away (I’m looking at you, dropping new year’s balls), but the familiarity doesn’t make many of the proceedings any less chortle worthy. And many of the jokes do actually miss; for all the buzz about the tight running time, there’s certainly still room for pruning. But the act of laughing together in public in a movie theatre is nearly a lost ritual, and I encourage it.