The Naked Gun Targets A Tom Cruise Classic With One Of Its Best Gags

This article contains spoilers for "The Naked Gun."

In Nicole Kidman's version of the cinephile's pledge of allegiance, we come to movie theaters to laugh, to cry, and to care, yet we don't seem to be doing much of the first part. To be fair, there have been several great theatrical comedies released over the past five years like the screamingly funny slapstick epic "Hundreds of Beavers," but they've rarely come from major studios. There are, of course, exceptions like "Barbie" or the miniature success of "No Hard Feelings," but otherwise, recent studio comedies have gone underseen, been relegated to streaming, or simply not been made. A comedy like 2023's extremely funny "Joy Ride" simply isn't treated with the same fervor as a blockbuster action movie. But if there's one film this year that possesses the power to hopefully change that tide, it's "The Naked Gun."

Ethan Anderton's overwhelmingly positive review of Akiva Schaffer's legacy sequel for /Film calls it the funniest movie of 2025, and I'm pretty much on the same virtual wavelength. "The Naked Gun" made me laugh throughout. It's an exuberantly silly 85-minute laugh riot that unleashes one funny sight gag after the other, which was made all the better by watching it with a crowd. Schaffer, director of great comedies like "Hot Rod" and "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping," manages to make his Liam Neeson-led spoof feel like a welcome companion piece to what David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (otherwise known as ZAZ) created rather than reheated leftovers.

Before Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin made audiences laugh their butts off in 1988, the character was introduced in the short-lived series "Police Squad." Despite being unceremoniously canceled by ABC after just six episodes, the 1982 oddity became a cult hit once more folks got wind of it. But where "Police Squad" was solely focused on lampooning straight-faced cop dramas like "M Squad" and "Adam-12," the original "Naked Gun" trilogy painted on a far broader cultural canvas. Indeed, where the first film directly parodies the confrontation in the Mayor's office from "Dirty Harry," the sequels do their own comedic covers of "Casablanca" and "Ghost." "The Naked Gun 33 ⅓" even gets a twofer in by hilariously sending up both the Union Station shootout from Brian DePalma's "The Untouchables" and the stairway peril of Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin."

Schafer's "Naked Gun" lets a lot of its humorous word play and creative sight gags take the reins, but there's only one sequence that directly spoofs not just one of the most acclaimed action movies of the 2010s, but also one of Tom Cruise's greatest hits.

Eden Tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston) may be the central antagonist of "The Naked Gun," but Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand) is more than willing to keep an eye on the nosy Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) for his boss. The opening sequence sees the security henchman stealing the P.L.O.T. (Primordial Law of Toughness) device as part of Cane's sinister plan to revert people back to their animalistic instincts and build upon their destruction. The only problem with preventing this is that Drebin Jr. isn't very smart — at least, not when it comes to getting easy answers. 

Nevertheless, the destructive Drebin offspring manages to get the drop on Gustafson during an unusual interrogation in which the latter wakes up handcuffed to a hospital bed, all while Drebin Jr. hammers him about the nature of the P.L.O.T. device. The bumbling detective thankfully subverts the tired "sexual assault in prison" joke trope by taunting his perp about being a prison influencer whose potentially gorgeous mugshot will make him an internet sensation that's ultimately unable to maintain their momentum after another pretty criminal gets their face out there. When Gustafson finally spills his intel on Project Inferno, Drebin Jr. gets in touch with his inner Ethan Hunt and has the walls come crashing down around him in the same manner as the opening of "Mission: Impossible — Fallout."

I had a feeling Schaffer was leaning into a parody of the "Fallout" fake-out where Ethan (Tom Cruise), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Wolf Blitzer/Simon Pegg) trick nuclear weapons specialist Nils Delbruuk (Kristoffer Joner) into spilling the beans and I laughed myself silly when the walls came down anyways. In both cases, it's such a great one-up on the audience. I laughed the first time I saw it in "Fallout" too, because I couldn't believe how Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise had conditioned us to expect the unexpected, and yet we all fell for it. If anyone's going to go to all the trouble of creating a huge hospital room set with a faux CNN broadcast of Wolf Blitzer's show, it's the best agents in the Impossible Mission Force. Going right from Ethan saying "What's done is done when we say it's done" and then moving full speed ahead into the title sequence is what the movies are all about.

Thankfully, "The Naked Gun" doesn't just stop at the set collapse. Drebin Jr., a man who believes cops don't arrest other cops, gets a surprise of his own when even more walls come crashing down to reveal a bigger setup orchestrated by Detective Barnes (Liza Koshy) of Internal Affairs for Gustafson's illegal interrogation. And just when you think there aren't any more walls left to destroy, a third operation is revealed by OSHA for all of the safety hazards posed. It transforms one of the great cinematic 'gotchas' of the 2010s into a very funny ambush of Russian Nesting Doll proportions.

(The hospital trick could also be seen as a nod to the "Mission: Impossible II" scene when Hunt hoodwinks Brendan Gleeson's pharmaceutical CEO John McCloy into giving up information about Bellerophon while he's trapped in a hospital bed.)

There were so many ways in which the "Naked Gun" crew could have faked the set-up within a set-up within a set-up with CGI. But instead, they built the whole thing for real. Schaffer holds a deep respect for the genre movies he's spoofing and simply wanted to stay close to the spirit of how they're made. "Fallout," along with the other McQuarrie "Mission: Impossible" films, was made with so much care and attention to doing as many of its tricks in camera. The "Naked Gun" hospital bit wouldn't have come together the way it did without production designer Bill Brzeski and construction coordinator Stacey McIntosh (who actually did some work on "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol").

Where McIntosh was the person responsible for rigging the walls to go up and down, Brzeski talked about the different levels of planning it took to visualize the gag while under a time crunch in the film's press notes:

"We made a little digital animated previz mockup first, to show Akiva how it would work; And then, we went through each step and reverse-engineered it. We had two days to shoot it, and we were worried we wouldn't have enough time. But at the end of the day, it worked, and it's one of the funniest sequences in the movie."

I distinctly remember noticing the non-diegetic music couldn't help but sound exactly like Lorne Balfe's "Fallout" score in this scene, only to discover in the end credits that he was the primary composer for "The Naked Gun" too. I'm sure it wouldn't have been too hard to lampoon his score with another composer, especially since the rights to both films are owned by Paramount, but it makes it that much funnier that Balfe had enough of a great sense of humor to parody his own work.

The best spoofs meet their targets on their level, and both manners of paying homage to one of Cruise's most successful films prove that "The Naked Gun" was always in good hands.

"The Naked Gun" is now playing in theaters nationwide.