The Naked Gun movies have always been like a machine gun of jokes, firing a perpetual spread of visual gags and silly dialogue for the highest amount of laughs per minute. After decades of being dormant, director Akiva Schaffer (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) picks up this old franchise and fires with impeccable aim and precision. He stays true to the fast-paced writing and direction of the Zucker brothers with tongue-in-cheek delivery and cartoonish gags involving claw machines and snowmen.

The key to the majority of this comedy involves Liam Neeson taking over the role of Frank Drebin from Leslie Nielsen, an actor who played himself so straight that even he was baffled by how easily he could gain laughs. Neeson has proven those chops with the previous films of Seth MacFarlane, as in Ted 2, with his hilarious bit involving his stern questioning of whether he’s old enough to purchase Trix cereal despite the product’s mantra of being just for kids. This Frank is built for a serious actor to seriously spout the dumbest lines ever written without cracking a smile. Neeson does it so well that it’s hard to imagine any other actor playing this character who gruffly states his name and rank while wearing a skirt and revealing his patterned underwear.

The plot follows the same path as previous Naked Gun movies, but it’s a wheel that doesn’t exactly need reinventing, considering the jokes are more modernly molded than datedly retreated. There’s another case of a mastermind planning a disastrous scheme with a femme fatale for whom Frank will fall for. This time, the villain is a tech mogul played by Danny Huston, and Pamela Anderson plays the woman who woos Frank. Anderson’s performance perfectly matches the cadence of Priscilla Presley, but also leans a little more towards the classic noir staging for her character delivering a sob story at the precinct. She’s also not afraid to go goofy for this role, as in her improvisation moment of scatting jazz with the most ridiculous sounds coming out of her mouth. I also dug Huston’s performance of him trying to pose as a manly man deserving of inheriting the world, only to be proven as a wuss when forced into actual combat. It’s a cartoonish yet cathartic dig at the obnoxious tech bros who won’t shut the fuck up about masculinity that are all talk and no bite, yelping when challenged even the slightest in their dated stances on the world.

The other characters mostly fulfill their roles as straight figures to stand back and give Frank a raised eyebrow when doing something dumb, or just go with the absurd flow. Paul Walter Hauser makes a suitable sidekick as the new Ed, keeping Frank informed on case specifics while sharing in the running gag of them constantly drinking coffee in nearly every scene together. CCH Pounder makes for a solid, blustering police chief continually chewing out Frank’s law-averting exploits. And there are some decent minor roles for Cody Rhodes, Busta Rhymes, and series regular “Weird Al” Yankovic that perfectly integrate them into a plot of evil tech plans.

It’s hard to write about a film like this beyond just being funny and ranking on how long and loud I howled at most jokes. The foreground gags are wonderfully absurd, especially the abundance of sex jokes that range from raunchy wordplay to mistaken perspectives to the wackiest romantic montage I’ve seen in a long time. But the background gags are just as clever, with a shut-down Police Squad donning a Spirit Halloween sign and a stadium sponsored by Ponzi-Scheme.com as a nice jab at cryptocurrencies. I also appreciated how the film never needed to fall back on old gags, treating the few odes as blink-and-you-miss-them appearances, such as the quick shot of the stuffed beaver from the first film.

While I don’t want to spoil the jokes that are present, I suppose it’s best to talk about what’s not there. The restraint of not constantly comparing to the original films is fine, but it does feel like some ingredients are missing for a film that binds itself to the same formula. The dig at O.J. Simpson is brief, but it feels like there’s a whole slew of jokes there that are sidelined. The same can be said for informing Frank of the latest gadgets to use in his war on crime. With so many innovations, the film never gives us that moment of introducing a stubborn Frank to more James Bond-style contraptions. And while a few silly bits were placed in the background of the big climax at an arena, I couldn’t help but feel there were missed opportunities for more signage gags. All of these, mind you, are minor nitpicks for a film that stays true not to Naked Gun lore, but the general hallmarks of what makes these movies fun.

The Naked Gun lives up to being a reprisal of a spoof that is dumb, fun, and full of…funny stuff. It follows the template of the original film, but updates its targets for going after the grittier, modern cop films more abundant with high tech and bloodier kills. It doesn’t reserve itself to references (despite a great bit involving Frank’s love of Buffy) and has enough confidence to go for the most cartoonish humor possible. The last time I can recall sustaining that level of falling-out-of-my-seat hilarity was with the disaster film Moonfall, but that comedy was unintentional. The Naked Gun’s intentional comedy rarely misses its target, keeping the hilarity right up to the credits littered with gags about Netflix passwords and eye charts. At this point, I’m just struggling to find synonyms for funny. So I’ll close with some adverbs: This movie is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very amusing.