It’s Legal for Comedy to be ‘Naked’ Again in 2025

July 30, 2025

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Have Gun, will Naked (CREDIT: Paramount Pictures)

Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Liza Koshy, Cody Rhodes, Eddie Yu

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Running Time: 85 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Cartoonish Violence and Pixelated Nudity

Release Date: August 1, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Carrying on the inimitable legacy of his late father, Lieutenant Detective Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) is the pride of Los Angeles’ Police Squad division. But he and his partner Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) – son of Frank Sr.’s old boss – find themselves a bit stymied by their latest case. Or pair of cases, really. Which are really the same case. First there’s a bank robbery in which none of the culprits actually take any money. Then there’s a dead man in an electric car in a ditch in an apparent suicide. But the deceased’s sister (Pamela Anderson) suspects some foul play. And it all leads back to tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who’s seeking to electrically revolutionize the world in his image.

What Made an Impression?: Legacy vs. Independence: In one of the first scenes of this rebooted version of The Naked Gun, Drebin Jr. looks at a portrait of his dad and asks him if he can be both exactly the same as him and also completely his own man. That’s basically the core challenge of any legacy sequel, but it’s especially acute when following in the footsteps of one of the most beloved spoof series of all time. Successful comedy thrives on surprise, but you risk alienation if you stray too far from the established formula. Well, I’m here to happily report that Drebin and Company have achieved their goal. This Naked Gun indeed honors the profoundly silly legacy of its predecessors while also working in a sufficiently altered milieu and blazing its own path.
All the Funny: It certainly helps when the crew behind the scenes has a knack for crafting funny business. Akiva Schafer is the key creative voice here, serving as a director and one of three credited screenwriters (along with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand). Schaffer is best known as one-third of The Lonely Island, the crew responsible for Saturday Night Live‘s Digital Shorts era. Unsurprisingly, he brings an omnivorous and shameless approach to the cavalcade of joke-a-minute gags of display. Vocal puns, text puns, visual puns, background gags, running gags, misdirects, hallucinatory diversions, bizarre character beats: if you hate one joke, don’t worry, because the forecast is like mountainous weather. Which is to say, a new joke is coming in just a minute.
A New Drebin for a New Era: The original Naked Gun movies and the Police Squad! TV show were released in a time when fictional police officials were widely accepted as trustworthy authority figures. But the cultural temperature is a little different in 2025. This Naked Gun is hardly a merciless takedown of copaganda, but it does take some genuinely hard shots at Drebin Jr’s extra-legal behavior. Neeson is just as occasionally oblivious and literal-minded as Leslie Nielsen was before him, but he’s also more feral and clearly deserving of being knocked down a few pegs.
L.A. is Full of Characters: Thus far, I’ve mainly talked about the director and the No. 1 Guy on the Call Sheet, without really spotlighting the supporting cast. So let me say: they’re all great! Pamela Anderson is a natural as the femme fatale, and Hauser is always reliable, while Huston and CCH Pounder also clearly understand the assignment of: “play it straight, and the laughs will follow.” Comedy is alive and naked, baby!

The Naked Gun (2025) is Recommended If You Like: To Laugh, and Laugh Again, and then Laugh Some More

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Coffee Cups

‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ Explores What It’s Like to Be a Sea Monster Family Living Amongst the Humans

June 29, 2023

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What’s Kraken? (CREDIT: DreamWorks)

Starring: Lana Condor, Toni Collette, Jane Fonda, Annie Murphy, Sam Richardson, Colman Domingo, Jaboukie Young-White, Liza Koshy, Blue Chapman, Eduardo Franco, Ramona Young

Director: Kirk DeMicco

Running Time: 91 Minutes

Rating: PG for Colorful, Town-Upending Sea Creature Battles

Release Date: June 30, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: 15-year-old Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor) lives with her parents and younger brother in the oceanside town of Oceanside, but she’s not allowed to ever go in the water. She soon discovers why, as an impromptu attempt to save her crush from drowning results in her blowing up into a certain gigantic legendary sea creature. As it turns out, her mom Agatha (Toni Collette) chose to raise her kids on dry land to escape the eternal underwater struggle for power. But once Ruby discovers that her grandmother (Jane Fonda), who insists on being called “Grandmamah,” emphasis on the last syllable, is the Warrior Queen of the Seven Seas, she happily embraces her royal heritage. On top of all that, Ruby becomes fast friends with a new girl in town who’s also a mermaid (Annie Murphy), whose eagerness to please might just merit a little skepticism.

What Made an Impression?: Oh, Canada, That Explains Everything: One gag that I wish Ruby Gillman had leaned on a little harder is the Gillman family cover story. They’re non-human creatures living amongst humans, so they explain away their cerulean hue and swishy physicality by insisting that they’re from Canada. It’s like the Coneheads saying that they’re from France: there was nothing particularly French about those SNL aliens, just as there’s nothing particularly maple-filled aboot these krakens. But it’s delightful to witness their neighbors accept that claim at face value. Instead of serving as a running gag, though, it’s just an appetizer to the fantastical adventure.
It Runs in the Family: With its transformational premise, you’d think that Ruby Gillman is primarily a metaphor about adolescence, and I suppose it is. But what struck me more was the focus on conflicting parenting philosophies. Or rather, accidentally similar mothering despite a concerted effort to avoid the previous generation’s mistakes. Agatha appears to be much more sensitive to Ruby’s predicament than Grandmamah ever was to her, but she’s also just as insistent that her kids must live a particular way. In a key scene, Fonda and Collette throw down in a tête-à-tête that illuminates the importance of granting grace to our family members, especially in the face of a wider threat.
Where There’s a Will: Ruby Gillman brings the comic relief in the form of some reliable yukmeisters. First, there’s Sam Richardson as Agatha’s eternally positive brother Brill, and then especially, the good humor cranks up when Will Forte makes waves as the wary but determined old sailor Gordon Lighthouse. This is the sort of character whose maiden is the sea, as he devotes himself to hunting down underwater creatures with Ahab-like devotion. Forte excels at these types who exist on the fringes of society, and he’s a welcome joy to leaven the scary-by-PG-standards action.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is Recommended If You: Suspect that mermaids are hiding something

Grade: 3 out of 5 Tentacles

Does ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ Rise to the Occasion?

June 8, 2023

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Beast Mode (CREDIT: Skydance/Paramount Pictures)

Starring: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback, Luna Lauren Vélez, Tobe Nwigwe, Dean Scott Vazquez, Peter Cullen, Pete Davidson, Liza Koshy, Cristo Fernández, John DiMaggio, Ron Perlman, Michelle Yeoh, David Sobolov, Tongayi Chirisa, Peter Dinklage, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Colman Domingo

Director: Steven Caple Jr.

Running Time: 127 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Metal Injuries

Release Date: June 9, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Hey, remember the 90s? The makers of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts sure do, because they went ahead and set the latest adventure of these extraterrestrial morphing robots in the era of g-funk and baggy jorts. But besides the occasional Wu-Tang or LL Cool J needle drop, that setting is mostly besides the point, as Rise of the Beasts is primarily concerned about the quest for a MacGuffin. That would be the Transwarp Key, a device with the power to allow Optimus Prime and the rest of the Autobots to return to their home planet of Cybertron after years in exile on Earth. Of course, if it instead falls into the wrong hands, it means that their enemies could destroy even more worlds. In their efforts to secure it, they recruit some human allies in the form of struggling family man Noah (Anthony Ramos) and museum intern Elena (Dominique Fishback). When they touch down in Peru, things get especially hairy, as they meet up with the breed of animalistic Transformers known as the Maximals.

What Made an Impression?: I know I’m not the only one who abandoned the Michael Bay-directed Transformers at a certain point. And with that in mind, the highest compliment I can pay Rise of the Beasts is that it continues the trend that began a few years ago with Bumblebee in which these movies’ climaxes are no longer incomprehensible onslaughts of metal clanking against metal. You can actually tell who’s talking! Distinct personalities can be detected! And some of those personalities are decently entertaining! Director Steven Caple Jr. and his screenwriting team don’t reinvent the mold at all, but you could imagine this movie actually coming out in 1994, when clarity and an adventurous spirit were valued as a matter of course.

While I appreciate that the Rise of the Beasts crew focused on the fundamentals, they didn’t exactly inspire me to become a diehard Transformers devotee. I’m about ten years too young for their original heyday, but anyone who’s more steeped in the lore than I am will probably find plenty to appreciate. And it certainly helps that you’ve got dignified actors like Michelle Yeoh and Peter Dinklage bringing their voices to life. But I’m mostly focused on Pete Davidson’s lil-stinker performance as the hologram-projecting Mirage. It’s the sort of comic relief that on paper seems like it would be a step too far for the Transformers status quo, but instead it’s just the hit of mustard needed to make the whole course palatable.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is Recommended If You Like: Some Transformers, but not too many Transformers

Grade: 3 out of 5 Maximals