“The Naked Gun” - Put your zeitgeist where your mouth is.

The main attraction to spoofs and parodies is that they make fun of something popular or familiar. Think about all of the most famous spoofs - every one of them has an explicit target. Scary Movie took aim at Scream and horror movies. Austin Powers made fun of James Bond and spy movies. Mel Brooks went after westerns (Blazing Saddles), Star Wars (Spaceballs), and Robin Hood (Robin Hood: Men in Tights). Even the original The Naked Gun was in on it, roasting cop shows and cop movies that were everywhere at the time. All of these movies worked because they rib the current zeitgeist of their time.

Not so with this new The Naked Gun. Instead of spoofing current events and current pop culture, it spoofs...itself. In other words, The Naked Gun (2025) is spoofing The Naked Gun (1988). I’ll admit that it’s entirely possible I missed some jokes about current stuff. I don’t doom scroll on social media and I haven’t watched scripted network or cable television shows in years. And I stopped watching cop shows after Castle went off the air. But I do watch a ton of movies and streaming shows and read a lot of news so I’m not completely ignorant of the world around me.

I also brought my thirteen-year-old son, who does know about social media stuff and other stuff for his generation. I knew he would laugh at the plethora of puns, dirty jokes, and physical comedy because he’s definitely part of the target audience and, also, he’s a thirteen-year-old boy. I laughed at the same stuff when I was his age. But he also summed up this movie quite well after it was over when he said, “I didn’t get a lot of the jokes.”

That’s not to say many of the jokes were too subtle or layered for him - or any thirteen-year-old - to understand. It’s that those jokes were based on things that happened decades ago. For example, there’s a decent bit where all of the cops in the precinct are talking to pictures of their deceased cop-parents hanging on the wall. This includes the main character Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) talking to a picture of Frank Sr. (Leslie Nielsen). Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) talking to a picture of Ed Sr. (Goerge Kennedy). And Fred Nordberg Jr. talking to a picture of Fred Sr. (O.J. Simpson). My son had never seen the original Naked Gun and did not know what O.J. Simpson looked like, so the entire bit went completely over his head.

To be fair, that O.J. bit works, even in 2025. But what about when Drebin laments still being upset about Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show? Or Drebin bonding with another character over the Black Eyed Peas (the musical group)? Or love interest Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) scatting in a jazz club? Or Weird Al Yankovic making a cameo as himself? None of those have been culturally relevant for at least a decade and a half. And scatting? Just...no.

In addition to not mining anything current for laughs, the film also refuses to mine jokes from anything that Neeson and Anderson are famous for. Considering all of the decades-old callbacks, it’s weird that they didn’t also do a Baywatch joke, a Schindler’s List joke, a Playboy joke, or a Taken joke. My son wouldn’t have gotten those jokes either, but he would have laughed at something like, say, Paul Walter Hauser wearing a too-small lifeguard swimsuit while rescuing his ransomed daughter.

But it’s not all bad news, depending on your sense of humor. The best way to describe the comedy in this film is stupid. Some of it is bad stupid (I cannot stress enough how unfunny and cringy it was to watch Anderson scat), but most of it is just silly stupid or gross stupid. There is a gag involving bad chili dogs. There is a gag involving owl poop. There is a sequence of sexual innuendo gags. There’s a running gag where people keep handing Neeson cups of coffee.

And there is pun after pun after pun after pun. If you laugh at such exchanges as “I went to school here...Oh really? UCLA?...Yes, I see LA every day. I live here,” or “You really can’t fight city hall...No, you can’t. It’s a building,” then you are going to bust a gut watching this movie.

I went into this movie knowing it was going to be stupid and I was not disappointed. Since I like silly stupid and gross stupid, and am also old enough to remember why the O.J. joke is funny, I laughed at a decent amount of it. But I would have laughed much harder and more often if this movie didn’t feel like it was made twenty years ago. And so would have my son.

Rating: Ask for two and a half or thirty-three and a third back. Gen X and Boomers know what I mean.

“Fantastic Four: First Steps” - Third time’s a charm.

I know you’re worried about Fantastic Four: First Steps. You remember the aggressively mediocre first two Fantastic Four movies featuring Jessica Alba and Chris Evans. You’ve tried to forget the atrocious reboot featuring Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan. And you still don’t trust that the MCU has truly turned the corner back into must-watch territory. But if you saw Thunderbolts*, you’ll have more confidence that Marvel has corrected itself. You did see Thunderbolts*, right?

Honest Trailers once joked that a good Fantastic Four movie did in fact exist - Pixar’s The Incredibles. It’s funny because it’s true. But now The Incredibles has competition with an official Fantastic Four film. First Steps finally gives us a film that might just be fantastic.

First Steps starts off exactly how it should - by not showing us a thirty-minute first act featuring how the Fantastic Four got their powers. Thank you, director Matt Shakman. Instead, we are thrust into a world where the Fantastic Four are beloved and considered Earth-828’s protectors. Yes, that number is important because the primary MCU Earth is 616. Don’t worry, the multiverse isn’t a focus in this movie. And because of that, bonus...you don’t have to know anything about the rest of the MCU for this movie. You’re welcome.

In New York City on Earth-828, it’s the 1960s and looks like if Disneyland’s Tomorrowland was right. The Fantastic Four live together in their very own tower in the city and everyone knows them by their actual names (their superhero names are never mentioned during the film). Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) have learned Sue is pregnant and share the news with Sue’s brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and family friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) over their weekly Sunday dinner. If this sounds a lot like Disney’s Carousel of Progress ride to you, you’ll known what I mean by, like the ride, this idyllic scene is interrupted.

Near the end of Sue’s pregnancy, a cosmic being called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) arrives at Earth to inform humanity that her master, Galactus (Ralph Ineson), is on his way to eat Earth. Yes, I said eat Earth. In an attempt to save Earth, the Fantastic Four locate Galactus’ current location in the galaxy, then fly there to negotiate with him. Galactus demands Sue’s baby in exchange for not eating Earth and they politely decline. Just kidding - fight scene.

What I love about this plot is it’s a form of the famous Trolley Problem. Doom one life to save everyone else or doom everyone else to save one? Because the film focuses much more on family and community than on punching bad guys, the dilemma has real heft. And not just for the four superheroes, but for the people initially angry at what they perceive as the obvious choice. Once Sue explains to them why they couldn’t just sacrifice their child, they actually listen. I know, right? After living on our Earth these past few years, especially these last few months, the idea of people actually listening to reason sounds utterly preposterous.

There’s a lot more to like about this film than just the moral dilemma. After the casting and writing disaster of 2015’s Fantastic Four, Marvel Studios did what they do best, creating a bunch of well-written characters and finding quite possibly the best possible choices of actors for all of the main characters (and even the minor ones). Ineson portrays a very menacing Galactus, even sprinkling in some nuance that has us feeling the tiniest bit of sympathy for him. Garner is even better as Silver Surfer, powering her emotions and expressions throughout Surfer’s character arc, as well as through the CGI liquid metal covering her entire body.

Quinn and Moss-Bachrach both tone down the cartoonishness of their characters and play up qualities not emphasized in previous film versions of their characters. Ben isn’t just a rock-covered strongman; he’s caring and soft-hearted to friends and strangers alike. Johnny is no longer a cocky, dumb, playboy, but a mildly subdued, intelligent man eager to help out.

Then there are Kirby and Pascal, shining much more as the heads of the family than the heads of a superhero team. Reed is still the familiar scientific genius, but he’s also every dad trying to figure out fatherhood on the fly. He just uses checklists and robots to help. Sue is still the familiar protector and loving wife, but with an undertone of don’t-fuck-with-me-now-that-I’m-a-mom. You all know what I’m talking about.

So, breathe a sigh of relief. First Steps is the Fantastic Four movie we’ve been demanding for decades. You can finally forgive 20th Century Fox Studios for mangling the franchise. You can also forgive Marvel Studios for the flood of forgettable and subpar content they fire-hosed at us after Avengers: Endgame. Now, you can look forward to the next MCU movie now that trust has been restored. And you can go watch Thunderbolts* because the box office sure looks like many of you didn’t see it.

Rating: Worth every penny, even if you’re still mad at Carousel of Progress always breaking down.

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” - Still?

With the success (I use this term loosely) of the Scream franchise’s reboot, and the profitability of scary movies in general, it was inevitable that another bygone horror franchise would be brought back from the dead. Afterall, horror movies are almost always cheap to make, people never get horror movie fatigue, and nostalgia is a powerful box office force. Or so I’m told.

I’m sure that’s what the studio executives were thinking when they assigned a random intern to go dumpster diving in their subterranean landfill of DVD cases. When that intern stumbled across a battered copy of I Know What You Did Last Summer, they excitedly ran to the executive suite, threw the DVD at the leather chair facing the window, then Uber’d to their college campus to change majors. And that is how reboots get made. Or so I’m told.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is an obvious choice to resurrect...if the target audience is people who were teenagers in the 1990s who still have bad taste in movies. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer was not particularly well-liked by critics (43% positive rating) and pulled in only $125 million. Its sequel plummeted to a 10% critical rating and $84 million box office, effectively killing the franchise. A direct-to-DVD sequel in 2006 and short-lived Amazon Prime series in 2021 served only to prove that people really didn’t like the franchise. Yet, here we are in 2025 with another requel (I will always hate the writers of Scream 5 for coining that term).

Rebooting a 1990s horror franchise isn’t the only lesson I Know What You Did Last Summer took from the Scream reboot. Like Scream 5, I Know What You Did Last Summer is very much a remake of the original but also a sequel (in this case, to the second film - I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), brings back the original survivors, all but puts a nametag on the killer early in the film, and isn’t scary at all.

In case you weren’t a teenager in the 1990s and never saw it, the original film’s plot was that a group of young people accidentally ran over a guy with their car, tried to cover it up, then were systematically murdered a year later by a killer seeking revenge who knew what they had done. This remake has the exact same plot but dumbs down the setup so much that even the Fast and Furious writers are shaking their heads in incredulity.

This time, reunited friends Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) are watching fireworks from the side of a road on a cliff with a blind curve. A car comes speeding around the bend, swerves to avoid hitting Teddy, crashes into the guard rail, and plummets to the ground below. Teddy calls 9-1-1, then convinces the group that they need to leave before the cops and paramedics show up. But why? Even if they were worried they could be blamed, the obvious lie is to just tell the cops the car was speeding around the curve and lost control, simply leaving out the part where Teddy was standing in the road. They even tried to stop the car from falling when it was teetering on the cliff’s edge. Not only is this a scenario where fleeing the scene and keeping it a secret makes no sense, talking to the cops and fibbing would have strengthened the killer’s motivation.

Speaking of the killer, wow was it obvious early on who the killer was. I won’t tell you why or how, but it’s nearly impossible to miss. The only real question is if there is just one killer or multiple killers. Scratch that, two questions. The other question is why does this movie feature exactly no scary scenes whatsoever?

The original I Know What You Did Last Summer was a straight slasher flick. It went for scares. The remake tried to reinvent itself more as a comedy horror, but forgot to tell most of the actors about the comedy part and forgot to add elements that make horror movies frightening. The result was a very non-scary contrast of Wonders, Pidgeon, and Freddie Prinze Jr. taking the movie way too seriously, Hauer-King and Jennifer Love Hewitt phoning it in, and Cline and Withers stealing every scene because they got the memo about the comedy part.

Yes, Hewitt and Prinze Jr. return and in their original roles. Sarah Michelle Geller returns as well, but only in a dream sequence. Which is a shame because she also nailed the comedy part in her one scene.

By the time the credits rolled - including a very predictable mid-credit scene - the only question I had was how much of the movie’s entertainment value was intentional. Many in the audience had fun watching it, but I think it’s because they saw it in a packed audience. Given the bad screenplay, laughably stupid dialogue, lack of frights or thrills, and mostly bad performances, it’s the kind of movie that typical leaves audiences grumbling. I think Cline was so fun to watch that she lifted an otherwise lackluster movie to the kind of movie you watch with a bunch of friends, a bunch of alcohol, and a bunch of running commentary. Which is how the entire franchise should be watched. Still.

Rating: Ask for sixteen dollars back. Or so I’m told.