Lieutenant Frank Drebin is not a good cop. That is the joke, and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! commits to it for 86 minutes without blinking. Released by Paramount Pictures on December 2, 1988, the film stars Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling officer who stumbles onto something much bigger than a shooting. David Zucker directed. The script comes from Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, Pat Proft and David Zucker — the team that built Police Squad! and carried it to the screen.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Shooting, A Ship, And A Queen
The plot is a straight-faced crime story wearing a clown suit. Officer Nordberg attempts to bust a heroin operation run by businessman Vincent Ludwig and is shot by Ludwig’s henchmen. Drebin returns to Los Angeles, visits Nordberg in the hospital, and gets cryptic clues — including a picture of Ludwig’s ship, where the deal was organized. Then he learns Nordberg’s jacket tested positive for heroin.
Police Squad is handed security for Queen Elizabeth II’s impending visit to Los Angeles. Captain Ed Hocken gives Drebin 24 hours to clear Nordberg before word gets out and detracts from the Queen’s visit. That clock is the whole engine of the film, and it never stops running.
Ludwig Wants $20 Million
Drebin visits Ludwig to ask about the ship and accidentally reveals that Nordberg is still alive. Ludwig then asks his assistant Jane, who does not know about his criminal activities, to get close to Drebin and find out what he knows. She hands over the information he wanted. They fall in love.
Ludwig meets Pahpshmir, from the Beirut meeting, to discuss killing the Queen. He agrees to do it for $20 million. His method: a beeper that uses post-hypnotic suggestion to turn anyone into an unwitting assassin. That is the film’s best invention — a murder weapon that requires the victim to be a completely innocent bystander.
Leslie Nielsen Plays It Straight
Nielsen is the reason this works. He plays Drebin with no wink at the audience, which is what makes the puns land. Priscilla Presley is Jane Spencer, Ricardo Montalban is Vincent Ludwig, George Kennedy is Ed Hocken, and O. J. Simpson is Nordberg. Nancy Marchand plays the Mayor. Raye Birk is Pahpshmir. Jeannette Charles plays Queen Elizabeth II, Ed Williams is Ted Olsen, and Tiny Ron is Al.
The film opens in Beirut, where Drebin disrupts a conference of the United States’ greatest enemies — Idi Amin, Muammar Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev — trying to conceive a terrorist plan to humiliate the U.S.
The Baseball Game And The Cameos
The film’s comic reach runs on visual and verbal puns and gags at a fast pace, and its cameo list is a time capsule. Major League Baseball player Jay Johnstone and umpires Joe West, Doug Harvey, Hank Robinson, Ken Kaiser and Ron Luciano appear. So do announcers Curt Gowdy, Jim Palmer, Tim McCarver, Mel Allen, Dick Enberg and Dick Vitale. Dr. Joyce Brothers cameos as herself.
“Weird Al” Yankovic plays himself, a bit he would repeat in the sequels. John Houseman appears uncredited as a driving teacher. Houseman died in October 1988, making this a posthumous appearance and his final film role.
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Why The Sequels Followed
The Naked Gun was a critical and commercial success. Two sequels followed: The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear in 1991 and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994. It is now considered one of the greatest comedy films of all time. A fourth film, a legacy sequel directed and co-written by Akiva Schaffer and starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, was released in 2025.
The mystery is thin. Ludwig’s guilt is never in doubt, and Jane’s ignorance of his criminal activities keeps her near Drebin rather than complicating anything. The film does not need a better mystery. It needs the one it has to keep moving, and it does.
What holds up is Nielsen. A lesser actor would have played Drebin as a fool. Nielsen plays him as a man who believes he is competent, and the gap between those two things is the entire film.
Strip out the gags and the plot still stands: a partner shot, a corrupt businessman, a deadline, a head of state in town. Most comedies of this era cannot survive that test, because the jokes were the structure. Here the structure was borrowed from a television show, and the film proves the template could carry a feature. 7.6 of 10.
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