Laughing it up

Movies talk to each other. What did the films of 2025 have to say? This is a look at how three movies from the past year tackle similar subjects in different ways. Be warned, SPOILERS for The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun follow.

The key to telling a joke is to not let on you’re telling a joke. A straight face, an even tone, nothing to give away that this is all nonsense. And this is especially important if you’re telling a joke you’ve told before, because then the punchline is known. It’s the telling that’s important, not the gag.

The Phoenician Scheme is the story of a globe-trotting father trying to reconnect with an estranged child, and this is definitely a tale Wes Anderson has told before. In particular in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which is one of my least favorite films of his, and perhaps that is partly behind my coolness to Scheme. I loved Anderson’s Asteroid City, which continued his streak of structural playfulness that creates deep emotional affection (and also had a heavy focus on young people, where Anderson is strongest), and Scheme’s embrace of to a similar story to past work felt like regression. But its episodic structure felt oddly inert as well — Benicio del Toro’s charmingly crooked industrialist and his novitiate daughter Mia Threapleton visit famous faces in far-off lands to plead with/threaten/screw over his investors, rinse, repeat. 

Anderson knows how to ping understatements off each other and has a surprising facility for mixing violence in his deadpan (an explosion at the beginning of the film in particular). His repressed and confused characters act outrageously but never acknowledge this, a delivery from MVP Michael Cera midway though the film cracked me up. But laughs were fairly thin on the ground for me otherwise, and without laughs the repetitive grifts and casual amorality felt empty. 

When Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson meet for the first time in The Naked Gun, there is a certain amount of exposition that contains a minute or so of dialogue with no laughs. This is notable because it is the only time the movie does not produce chuckles or groans or guffaws or full-on heaving choking gasps, I legitimately thought my buddy might die during the movie’s showstopping romantic montage. Like its 1988 predecessor (and its original form, the sitcom Police Squad!), The Naked Gun takes the sturdy framework of a loose cannon cop taking on nefarious crime and uses this to assault cliche within the genre and without, looking for any opportunity to land a gag. And like his ZAZ forebears, director Akiva Schaffer (and a crew of screenwriters) never breaks the deadpan tone. Schaffer uses reveals and edits to create punchlines but does so deftly, a man dancing across bubbles that he lets the audience explode with laughter. 

And his dancing partner is Liam Neeson, who in some ways is giving the inverse of Bill Murray’s work in Rushmore, the film that put Anderson on the map. In Rushmore, Murray starts his second career as a sad clown, letting the memories of his 80s and 90s wiseassery provide shading to rueful despondency. The original Naked Gun (and Police Squad!) mined the straight-laced gravitas of Leslie Nielsen while tapping into his comic instincts; the reboot lets Neeson draw on his past two decades of bone-crushing wife- and -daughter avengement but also lets the melancholy, the sense of something lost or set aside, color his dense comic gruffness. How else to explain the incredible delivery of “She had the type of bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown,” scatological yearning that is somehow also completely sincere and all the more hilarious for this?

Whatever my issues with Anderson, I have never doubted his sincerity — his complicated style is a way of trying to understand how simple truths, namely death, can set off complicated emotional responses. Del Toro spends Scheme going through near-death experiences, complete with Heavenly judgment (Murray again!) and the titular scheme becomes his way of trying to reconcile his life and its principles with that life’s ending. And while a lot of the film feels familiar, del Toro’s climactic confrontation with his evil brother, Benedict Cumberbatch as the embodiment of Mammon, does feel like he’s breaking new ground. It’s violent and destabilized and Cumberbatch is downright demonic, the schemes have fallen away to something unadorned. This leads to the denouement, where del Toro has forsaken wealth to work in a diner with his daughter, still enjoying his cigars but content with a small existence with his family.

The Naked Gun’s climax involves Neeson being carried into battle by an owl that is a spiritual messenger for his dead father, this is after his nude descent into an MMA match helps prevent a techno-rage apocalypse. But of course he saves the day and gets the girl and order is restored — until a very funny post-credits sequence, which turns the Police Squad! freeze frame gag (a fake freeze in which everyone on camera tries to act as still as possible) into a post-modern nightmare of Neeson and Anderson realizing they’re in a credits sequence. And just like in every ZAZ film, the credits themselves are filled with jokes and goofs — my favorite is following “On Set Dresser – Adam Maier” with “On Set Dressing – Ranch – Russian – Italian – Vinaigrette.” The Naked Gun fits in every joke it can, and if these ones in particular are direct riffs on older material, they are still funny. And the sheer commitment to the bit is ultimately its own source of pleasure. Anderson both treads water and attempts something new with his comedy, the makers of The Naked Gun find joy in reinvigorating something old with fluency and flair. They’re both comedies with purpose, but I know which one made me laugh harder.