Pamela Anderson Is Quietly Revolutionary in The Naked Gun

We’re always making room for new stars and fresh new faces, as we should: a love of beauty, in all its forms, is what keeps our love for the movies going. But what about a face that feels new yet familiar at the same time? Sometimes the face we didn’t know we needed is one that we’d written off, or just forgotten about, long ago.

Welcome to the new age of Pamela Anderson.

Anderson is the best thing about The Naked Gun, Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of the 1980s and ’90s comedy franchise from filmmaking trio David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, who knew how to turn silliness into gold. Schaffer doesn't have the same touch. Liam Neeson stars as numbnuts police detective Frank Drebin Jr. (the son of Leslie Nielsen’s character in the original pictures). Danny Huston is Richard Crane, an Elon Muskalike billionaire villain who has obtained a device that brings out humans’ most animalistic qualities. His plan is to let the hoi polloi destroy one another so he can rebuild society to his liking. Anderson’s Beth Davenport is the sister of a man who has died under mysterious circumstances connected with Crane’s enterprise. She shows up in Drebin’s office in full femme fatale garb, a clingy white dress topped off with a black beret and sunglasses that look as if they’re about to take flight. She’s not out to seduce Drebin, at least not yet. For now, she wants only to unearth the truth behind her brother’s death. Given her profession, she’s just the gal to do it. “I write true crime novels based on fictional stories that I make up,” she tells Drebin in one breathless rush, her timing as lilting and perfect as a sea breeze.

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Neeson is perfectly fine in The Naked Gun, which opens with a few promising gags before running aground in the last third. But he’s at his best in his scenes with Anderson, and that tells you something. She’s a performer who reflects light rather than soaking it up. That was clear from her gorgeously wistful performance in Gia Coppola’s 2024 The Last Showgirl, in which she played a veteran member of a Las Vegas dance revue about to be closed in favor of a flashier, tackier show. Anderson’s character in that film, 57-year-old Shelly, is both optimistic and pragmatic; she’s seen it all, and she’s made mistakes, but she can’t help looking toward the future. Through much of the movie, she wears little or no makeup—a performer’s job is to create an illusion, but off-duty, the only person she can be is herself.

Anderson’s press promotion for the film reflected that reality: she appeared with minimal makeup, usually wearing simple but gorgeously tailored clothes. Her unvarnished presence—even if, admittedly, it involved careful presentation—was a reminder that celebrities are people too, with real lives and real feelings. Like us, they’re the sum of their choices, but also like us, they can be victims of circumstance, faced with the challenge of how to make the best of bad luck. Anderson became a keystone of 1990s pop culture as the voluptuous beach bunny lifeguard C.J. Parker on Baywatch. In the mid-1990s, when a honeymoon sex tape she’d made with her then-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, was stolen from their home and made available as a download, it was she, and not him, who was treated as the cheap commodity. In 1998, Lee was charged with spousal abuse, and Anderson filed for divorce. Anderson has said it was the worst period of her life.

Now, though, she has become a performer to watch, for all the right reasons. She’s glorious in The Naked Gun. Everything she does, even in a not-always-so-funny film, works: When Beth takes the stage for an impromptu scat number in a jazz club, she goes for broke, coming off like a cross between Anita O’Day and Dino the Dinosaur. When Huston’s Cane, dazzled by her beauty, asks her, “May I speak freely?” she responds, in an authoritative purr, “I prefer English.” She’s in command and devil-may-care at once.

Anderson does, of course, wear makeup in The Naked Gun; she’s playing a femme fatale, after all. But there’s still something intensely intimate about her performance style, even in this comedy. Anderson is only 58 years old; it’s more than a little twisted that we feel compelled to celebrate a woman who “looks her age”—whatever that really means—in Hollywood. Shouldn’t we have gotten beyond all that, now that we’ve allegedly become a society that accepts all ages, shapes, and sizes, applauding beauty in its myriad forms?

Maybe—but then, how do we explain the fact that most social-media influencers look and behave more or less the same? Having curly hair or face piercings or a healthy BMI might set you apart slightly, but not much. Instagram and TikTok have a way of flattening out differences rather than enhancing them. The samey-sameness is the point. The whole idea of social media is to present an image of perfection to the world, to say, “This is how I really am!” even when we all know it’s not the reality.

Almost everything in popular culture right now seems to be grooming us into submission, or at least just catatonic acceptance. That’s true of the new Naked Gun, too, which is being released by Paramount. The presence of Huston’s Musklike aspiring overlord aside, the movie is almost adamantly apolitical, certainly compared with the 1991 Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear, which featured a cadre of villains out to vanquish environmentally progressive developments like electric cars and solar panels in order to further the interests of the oil industry. In the 1990s, you didn’t have to do much to frame guys like that as villains; today, they're the billionaires everyone wants to be, and their interests must be protected at all costs.

Maybe that’s why Anderson’s presence in the film feels revolutionary—not in an overtly political way, but as a small act that might help preserve our sanity, a reassurance that not everyone is in on the grift of lulling us into believing that our new status quo is OK. Sometimes a performance, even in a dumb comedy, feels like a lifeline. We’ve all seen the side-by-side photographs of women like Kristi Noem and Kimberly Guilfoyle before-and-after plastic surgery, and even as we clock the horrors of overplumping and aggressive scalpel work before our very eyes, we still hear those little voices inside us saying, “Don’t assess women by their looks! Don’t pass judgment on their personal choices!”

But really, what’s wrong with heeding the louder inner voice that says, “Why on Earth would any thinking human being do that to her face?” In a world where up is down and down is up, day after day, it’s a relief to look at a celebrity face and see the texture of real skin, to see crows’ feet—or laugh lines, as we call them in moments of self-tenderness—that haven’t been smoothed into oblivion. Anderson is, as she always has been, gorgeous; she has the kind of face that doesn’t need a lot of help. We should all be so lucky, at any age, to be able to swipe on a little tinted moisturizer and a whisk of lip balm and head out the door looking like an off-duty movie star. But you can also read a face as a summation of choices. You can tell when someone has chosen joy. Anderson is telling us now that it’s the only choice.