The Naked Gun teaser trailer lands brutal O.J. Simpson joke
If you’re under 30 and have no cultural awareness of anything before your year of birth (stop pretending you don’t know what a VCR is), you may not understand how goofy the original Naked Gun movies were.
Starring comic madman Leslie Nielsen, the three movies started as a 1982 TV series called Police Squad before jumping onto the big screen. The first film was released in 1988, followed by sequels in 1991 and 1994.
Nielsen played a bumbling police detective who somehow always got his man thanks to mostly dumb luck. The films were very wink-wink and leaned into over-the-top humour.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.The first trailer for the Liam Neeson-led The Naked Gun just dropped, and it signals the newest version is very much keeping to the spirit of its predecessors. Be warned, don’t expect nuance and gritty social realism.
How can you when the trailer features, among other things, a full-size Neeson emerging out of his disguise as a young Catholic schoolgirl to foil a bunch of bank robbers, a pair of strawberry print undies beneath his pleated skirt.
When a hostage asks, “Who are you?”, he responds, “Frank Drebin, police squad, the new version,” and looking directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall.
The trailer also takes a brutal stab at the legacy of O.J. Simpson, who had starred in all three of the original films.
There’s a sequence during which Neeson’s Frank Drebrin Jr is talking to a photo of Nielsen with “Hi, daddy, it’s me, Frank Jr”, followed by co-star Paul Walter Hauser doing the same with a photo of George Kennedy’s Captain Ed Hocken – (“Hey, dad, boy do I miss you”).
It’s nepo babies galore as the camera pulls out to take in a whole room of cops kneeling before the photos of their dead police parents before it cuts to a framed picture of Simpson as his character, Nordberg. Awks.
But it doesn’t have to be. Nordberg’s son then looks at the camera and shakes his head, accompanied with an “uh-uh”, and looks down. Ha!
For a movie that is clearly deeply connected to the original films, the only way through the O.J. of it all is to take it head on.
Simpson died last year while Nielsen died in 2010 and Kennedy in 2016.
The 2025 version is directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer and written by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand from a story by Seth MacFarlane, who also serves as a producer.
The rest of the cast includes Pamela Anderson, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Cody Rhodes, Liza Koshy, Eddie Yu and Danny Huston.
