It's got vintage terrible puns, nicely detonated clichés, and a handful of inspired gags. But it lacks the quality of aggression the ZAZ films had.

Liam Neeson almost works as a Drebin for a new, coarser, meaner age, and he has no problem suggesting a surly, disgruntled son of the cop immortalized by Leslie Nielsen in the short-lived 1982 TV series “Police Squad!

That is the great gift of director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer ’s The Naked Gun (August 1), a continuation of the beloved 1980s and ’90s police spoof film series. At its best, this new Naked Gun is a dumb, loopy delight, a return to the kind of comedy that was woefully taken for granted in its heyday and now barely exists at all.