The Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, has set a new record for the film franchise on Rotten Tomatoes after becoming one of the best-reviewed comedies of the last five years.
The spoof comedy sequel to Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun movies of the 1980s and 1990s currently has a 91 per cent score on the review aggregator website, which is higher than any of the previous films in the series.
The original Naked Gun (1988) has an 88 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, its two sequels, The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994), scored a critical consensus of 77 per cent and 65 per cent respectively.
The new film, directed by Akiva Schaffer and produced by Seth MacFarlane, had debuted with a 96 per cent score but has since dropped to 91 per cent as more reviews have been published.
It is one of the most positively reviewed comedies of the 2020s so far, with Forbes noting that only five movies from the genre have a higher score: The Mitchells Versus the Machines (97 per cent), Shiva Baby (96 per cent), Language Lessons (96 per cent), The Banshees of Inisherin (96 per cent) and Palm Springs (94 per cent).
In the latest Naked Gun instalment, Neeson plays the role of Frank Drebin Jr, the son of the lead character from the first three films and Police Squad! TV show, played by Nielsen.
Pamela Anderson, Kevin Durand and Paul Walter Hauser also star, while former UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping and WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes both have cameos.
In a four-star review, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey writes: “The question of how Neeson compares to Nielsen matters less than how perfectly he fits into a 2025 Naked Gun, which subtly shifts the punchline away from the self-seriousness of cop shows and towards the self-seriousness of cops themselves, in a world increasingly suspicious of their intent and authority. This Frank Drebin insists that the past was better, when ‘the only things that were electric were eels, chairs, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago’.
The first Naked Gun film, released in 1988, was written and directed by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, and was based on their television series Police Squad!. The show parodied the genre of police procedurals that were popular at the time. The original trilogy was hugely successful, making over $216m at the box office.
