Author: Jack Salvadori

Surely, the new Naked Gun isn’t that good. (And yes, I know — don’t call me Shirley.) Yet here we are: critics beaming, audiences howling, and somewhere in Hollywood a marketing exec uncorking supermarket Prosecco. But let’s be clear, this isn’t really about the film’s brilliance. What we’re witnessing is a sociological phenomenon disguised as cinematic enthusiasm.

Two forces are at play.

First, the young crowd: poor souls who’ve never been blessed with the Mount Olympus of absurdist humour, never felt the pure, chaotic joy of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker (ZAZ). For them, this reboot is a revelation: a surreal, lawless universe where the only rule is get the extra laugh, even if your audience is already gasping for breath. No wonder they think this is a masterpiece: they’ve never tasted the originals!

Then there are the veterans, the ones who grew up with Frank Drebin and consider Leslie Nielsen the world’s funniest grandfather. For them, it’s not just a movie, it’s a nostalgia trigger, the cinematic equivalent of finding your childhood lunchbox in the attic, still faintly smelling of peanut butter and playground summers.

When Seth MacFarlane announced the remake, I cried blasphemy. When the trailer dropped, my fears were confirmed: goofy gags with none of the ZAZ magic, another reboot stripped of its soul. A Naked Gun without Nielsen? Like The Pink Panther without Peter Sellers (yikes). I vowed never to see it.

But then… the chatter began. Friends I trust were raving. Critics I respect were grinning. FOMO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to a cinema seat. At least I’d see it with a laughing crowd.

And… well, it wasn’t terrible. In fact, I was impressed, especially with the writing, which surprisingly channels the spirit of the originals. Liam Neeson is no Nielsen (no one is), and the jokes-per-minute ratio is far lower. Zucker would hit you from four directions at once: foreground chaos with the main action, background sight gags crammed with visual nonsense, dialogue stacked with puns, and even absurd audio cues. Everything was funny, all the time.

The new Naked Gun doesn’t quite match that density. Some jokes repeat. Some are stolen. And some just fall flat.  Then director Akiva Schaffer broke a few sacred ZAZ commandments. Rule One: never cast comedians. Zucker’s genius was using serious actors delivering nonsense with a straight face. He wouldn’t have known what to do with Robin Williams or Eddie Murphy; Nielsen wasn’t associated with comedy before Airplane!, and that’s why it worked. Here, several side characters, like Paul Walter Hauser and CCH Pounder, lean too hard into “Hey, I’m in a comedy!” territory. Imagine those performances dropped into a serious thriller: the tonal whiplash would be lethal. And all those reaction shots underlining the jokes? Zucker would never. If you missed a gag because you were still laughing at the last one, that was your problem.

But… overall, it’s not the desecration I feared, by far. Which got me thinking: are people genuinely in love with this film, or do they just miss laughing out loud?

The spoof genre is older than you think. One of the first was The Little Train Robbery (1905), and Chaplin’s 1916 A Burlesque on Carmen mocked Cecil B. DeMille’s Carmen just a year after its release. Whenever a genre formula goes stale, parody keeps it alive, from Mel Brooks’ classics to ZAZ masterpieces like Airplane!, Top Secret!, and, of course, The Naked Gun. But something shifted about 25 years ago. Scary Movie hit in 2000 and made piles of cash. Suddenly, screens were swamped with Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie… films with no real plot, just an assembly line of cheap gags. I can still see 12-year-old me buying a ticket for Meet the Spartans on a Saturday afternoon; like the Crispy McBacon I ate afterwards, I knew it was junk, but it was a fun time. Critics begged Hollywood to stop the mass production of these cinematic crimes, but the studios doubled down with Vampires Suck and The Starving Games… Until eventually, the bubble burst. As with every exploitation wave, even spoofs stopped selling tickets, so they stopped making them. Comedy got cleverer, more structured… and audiences forgot how to belly-laugh.

Which is why I think this new Naked Gun is hitting so hard. Because it’s a reminder, a ghost of the cinematic silliness we once took for granted. The distant echo of a laugh lost in time. Maybe, just maybe, if the infamous Epic Movie were released today it would also be a hit, and Meet the Spartans embraced by the jolly crowds. Because maybe, just maybe, we’ve all just been waiting for an excuse to laugh like idiots again.

Jack Salvadori is an Italian-born, London-based film critic, columnist, and filmmaker. With award-winning short films showcased at over 60 international festivals, he’s now developing both, a feature film and a theatre play. A familiar face at Cannes, Venice, and London Film Festivals, Jack spends most of his time at the BFI, watching everything from old classics to niche gems. He lives in London with his cactus.