Liam Neeson tries his hand at broad comedy in a slapstick detective spoof hitting French theaters this Wednesday. The Naked Gun: Save the World? is a 2025 reboot of the absurdist parody genre made famous by the ZAZ trio.
Liam Neeson, in full-on comedy mode: the actor known for Schindler’s List, his reinvention as a violent avenger in Taken, and as a Jedi Master in The Phantom Menace, now plays a clueless, blundering cop in The Naked Gun: Save the World?, opening Wednesday in France.
In this send-up of film noir, the Northern Irish star joins Pamela Anderson to revive the goofy spirit of comedies whose French titles once had audiences asking whether there was a pilot on the plane (1980), a cop to save the queen (1988), the president (1991), or Hollywood (1994).
The 2025 version of The Naked Gun: Save the World? brings back the absurdist humor pioneered nearly 40 years ago by the legendary ZAZ team—brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams—whose influence shaped generations of American parody films, including the Scary Movie franchise.
In France, ZAZ were a major inspiration for Alain Chabat’s comedy group Les Nuls, and were honored with a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française in late 2024, celebrating their gift for “pastiche and the comic collision of cinematic references.”
Directed by Akiva Schaffer, the new installment centers on the suspicious death of a tech executive—but the plot is just an excuse to gleefully twist noir clichés for laughs: the widowed cop addicted to coffee, the sultry femme fatale with a heart of gold, and the villain who wants to take over the world.
Liam Neeson plays Inspector Frank Drebin Jr with a hilariously straight face. He plows through cyclists in his patrol car and casually recalls the one man he shot that stuck with him—because, unlike the rest of his long list of victims, that guy was white.
Drebin’s legendary ineptitude also leads to the escape of hundreds of inmates—including Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs—in one of many pop culture nods peppered throughout the film. Other shoutouts include the bank robbery sequence from The Dark Knight and the iconic shapeshifting masks from the Mission: Impossible series.
With AFP
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