Detective Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) has to prevent evil tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston) from recovering the P.L.O.T. Device computer chip that will help him reset the world to his vision. Along the way he will be offered assistance by the beautiful Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) and colleague Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser).

I stepped into my screening of The Naked Gun with a little trepidation. Could anyone really do justice to a sequel to The Naked Gun and the comedy spoof genre after so many years of it being out of favour? Well the answer, surprisingly is yes. Director and Co-Writer Akiva Schaffer who is most famous for being part of The Lonely Island comedy group with Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone has managed to deliver a film that honours the original Leslie Nielsen films and delivers plenty of laughs.

In terms of laughs they come thick and fast in a multitude of ways. If one fails to tickle your funny bone there should be another one along in a second that will. In fact for me, for the first time in a long while there was a comedy sequence that had me crying tears of laughter. I am not sure I remember doing that in the cinema since the likes of the Austin Powers movies. As with the original movies they take the form of sight gags, literal interpretations of sayings, absurdism and just about any other form of humour you can think of. All the while with Liam Neeson playing everything as straight as an arrow as the grizzled cop who plays by his own rules.

The nods to the original films are not just in the characters and types of jokes. There are a number of sequences that feel like new interpretations of those in the original films, a Weird Al Yankovic appearance, a blink and you miss it cameo for Priscilla Presley, an owl that has a connection to Frank Drebin Sr. and a credits sequence that demands you stay until the very end and keep your ears and eyes open for more jokes.

Perhaps most importantly it is the performances that really sell the comedy. Our expectations of these actors are wrapped up in what we have seen them do before and every single one of them seems cast in a way to mimic and mock that. Neeson as the straight talking action cop, Anderson as the sex bomb love interest, Huston as the sneering villain and Hauser as the friendly sidekick.

If you are a fan of the comedy spoof this should hit the spot.