The Naked Gun makes fun of a lot of movies and tropes, but I bet that you didn’t catch how it parodies a Samuel L. Jackson movie villain. Overall, the Naked Gun franchise isn’t known for its subtlety, with many of its jokes being hilarious because of how on-the-nose they are.
The 2025 sequel finally brings back one of the most beloved comedy franchises of all time, with Liam Neeson taking over as Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen’s original protagonist. Neeson’s version still gets into many of the same hijinks and wacky situations as his father, but the film sets its sights on a different genre to parody.
The original Naked Gun was meant to be a parody of the police movies of the 1970s and 1980s, as it was based on the Police Squad! TV show, which itself made fun of police procedural shows. However, the 2025 film isn’t attempting to do this. It instead makes fun of modern tropes, including one Samuel L. Jackson villain.
Richard Cane’s The Naked Gun Plan Parodies The Villain’s Plan From Kingsman: The Secret Service
Although the franchise isn’t explicitly mentioned, Kingsman fans had to notice all the similarities between the spy series and 2025’s The Naked Gun. As it turns out, the villain’s plan in the new film is almost beat-for-beat the same as that of Kingsman: The Secret Service, the 2014 action comedy film directed by Matthew Vaughn.
In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Jackson plays the villainous tech mogul Richmond Valentine, who has an evil plan to distribute SIM cards that will send out a special signal when activated. This signal will cause everyone in the immediate vicinity to turn violent, with humanity attacking each other until most of the population is wiped out.
Valentine won’t be part of this má´€ssacre, however. Instead, he has created a secluded bunker that VIPs will hide out in. These include celebrities, politicians, and wealthy elites, who will repopulate and rebuild society once the attacks are finished.
Sound familiar? Danny Huston plays the villainous Richard Cane in The Naked Gun. He is a wealthy tech mogul who steals the P.L.O.T. Device and plans on using it to send a signal out that will revert humans to a state of barbarism. While the human population is culled, Cane and the elites (including “Weird” Al Yankovic) will hide out in a bunker and rebuild society.
There are too many similarities between Valentine’s and Cane’s plans for it to be a coincidence. Everything, down to their first names, is similar, even if The Naked Gun‘s plan takes on a goofier tone. Kingsman: The Secret Service is clearly one of the biggest targets of The Naked Gun‘s satire, even though it isn’t a police movie.
The Naked Gun Parodies Spy Movies Rather Than Cop Movies (& That’s A Good Thing)
The big reason that the Kingsman story plays such a big role in The Naked Gun is that the newer film isn’t trying to make fun of cop movies. Police stories were all over the place in the decades preceding the original trilogy, and since Police Squad! was a police procedural parody, it made sense for the movies to be the same.
However, cop movies just aren’t as prevalent anymore. The genre has fallen out of favor with general audiences, and while some are still made, they aren’t popular enough to warrant an entire parody. These modern movies don’t have iconography popular enough for jokes to be warranted, meaning that The Naked Gun had to take a new direction.
Instead, the film decided to parody spy movies. These are close enough to police movies that they still make sense for The Naked Gun, as both genres are about government authorities taking down bad guys. Kingsman, Mission: Impossible, James Bond, and other spy franchises have been immensely popular in recent decades, yet Austin Powers hasn’t been around to parody them.
The Mission: Impossible franchise is another spy series that is directly parodied throughout The Naked Gun. The scene in which Frank Drebin Jr. takes off the little girl costume is reminiscent of the Mission: Impossible mask scenes, and the Police Squad’s scheme to get Sig Gustafson to reveal the villain’s plan is exactly like the opening fake-out from Fallout.
This pivot to spy movies was a great idea, as it allows the franchise to stay true to its roots while still parodying a modern trend. If the film made fun of the same police tropes from the 1970s and 1980s, it would have felt immediately dated, and modern audiences probably wouldn’t have found the satire nearly as funny.
Luckily, copying the Kingsman plot doesn’t alienate audiences who aren’t familiar with the franchise. The series is meant to be an homage to spy movies, so Jackson’s villain is meant to be a homage as well. By taking this route, The Naked Gun‘s story acts as a specific parody of Kingsman as well as an overall parody of spy stories.
