Contains spoilers for “The Naked Gun” (2025)
Akiva Schaeffer’s reboot-slash-legasequel of “The Naked Gun” is jam-packed from start to finish with so many jokes that viewers might need to watch the movie multiple times in order to catch them all. Every type of humor is there: puns, pratfalls, parodies, references, self-references, dirty jokes, topical jokes, absurdist jokes, meta jokes, tons of background gags, and even joke credits. While “subtle” might not be the proper word to describe anything about a movie as gleefully, brilliantly stupid as “The Naked Gun,” several of the film’s funniest reference jokes form a running gag that might not immediately occur to you.
Basically, every pop cultural reference Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) makes implies that the character’s mindset is forever stuck in the early 2000s. For example, when learning about electric cars, he says, “I remember when the only things that were electric were eels, chairs, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in ‘Chicago.'” He’s TiVoed all of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” When asked about reading suspects their Miranda Rights, he corrects what he interprets as a “Sex and the City” reference: “No. Carrie writes, Miranda’s a lawyer, Charlotte’s an art dealer, and Samantha is a whore.” He orders “freedom fries” at McDonald’s, has an intense appreciation for The Black Eyed Peas (including some of their more offensively dated lyrics), and is still hung up on Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show.
Why is Frank hung up on the 2000s?
Since “The Naked Gun” never gives an official reason for all of Frank’s Y2K-era nostalgia, a few different explanations can be theorized. We know that Frank has been focused entirely on his job since the death of his football player cop wife, so perhaps the implication is that she died around 2005? Then again, trying to make sense of any timeline in “The Naked Gun” franchise is a futile task. After all, if the Frank Jr. in this movie is supposed to be the same one born at the end of 1994’s “The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult,” then is he both 31 years old and an old man?
The simplest explanation for all the early-2000s nostalgia is the same explanation for everything else in the movie: it’s funny. The Gen X and Millennial writers must have had a lot of fun transferring their memories of being young adults in the 2000s into a comically gruff Boomer as a means of making fun of their own feelings of “getting old.” Keeping most of the pop culture jokes intentionally dated to stuff still remembered (whether fondly or not) decades later might also help prevent the film from becoming unintentionally dated.
