The most recent edition of The Week (sign up here) includes an obituary of the actor Val Kilmer, whose film debut was Top Secret!. Kilmer plays “an Elvis-like musician who somehow gets tied up in an anti-communist plot against the government of East Germany” in what the newsletter describes as “a joke-a-second spoof by the team that brought us Airplane!”

That same team was also responsible for The Naked Gun, a deadpan police comedy franchise starring Leslie Nielsen, who became a comedy legend starting with Airplane!. (The Naked Gun movies were based on the short-lived, ahead-of-its-time TV series Police Squad!.) It would be hard to imagine an installment without Nielsen as the bumbling detective Frank Drebin. We need imagine no more. A new Naked Gun is coming later this year, starring Liam Neeson. Here’s the trailer:

My guess is that the bizarre opening scene of the trailer, showing Liam Neeson (playing Frank Drebin’s son) disguised as a little girl sneaking into and then brutally and comically defusing a bank robbery, is also the opening of the movie. It bears a certain resemblance to the opening scene of the original Naked Gun film, in which Nielsen’s Drebin (in the fulfillment of many patriotic Americans’ dreams, then and now) infiltrates a secret meeting of all of America’s international enemies and beats them all up.

Neeson is an interesting choice as Nielsen’s successor. Given how thoroughly comedic roles defined the second half of Nielsen’s career, it is easy to forget that he got his start as a strait-laced performer in such films as the (excellent) Forbidden Planet and The Poseidon Adventure. Neeson has displayed comedic chops in some prior roles. But he is mostly known as an action star in such films as Taken, or as a mentor figure in such films as Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and Batman Begins (sort of . . .). I will still have a hard time accepting anyone else performing Nielsen’s pratfalls. The man has a fart joke on his tombstone, for goodness’ sake.

It’s hard to tell from the trailer alone, but I have some reservations about whether this new Naked Gun will fit the tone — and be worthy of — prior entries. It relies heavily on fourth-wall-breaking, of which there was some in the original trilogy (and the TV series), but applied sparingly. The joke about all the force’s cops lining up to tell their dads (also cops) how much they miss them is good, though . . . as is the pan to the one cop who might have a reason not to miss his dad so much. The pointed absence of any behind-the-camera talent from the original movies, however, is reason enough to withhold judgment for now.