Liam Neeson's New Comedy Reboot Debuts With Record-Breaking Rotten Tomatoes Score

The Naked Gun has broken a record on Rotten Tomatoes. The new comedy movie, which was directed by Akiva Schaffer, stars Liam Neeson as wacky police officer Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. opposite an ensemble cast that includes Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, Kevin Durand, CCH Pounder, Busta Rhymes, and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

The upcoming Naked Gun is the fourth feature-length installment in the franchise. The original trilogy, which starred Leslie Nielsen (Airplane!, Spy Hard, Scary Movie 3) as Frank Drebin, debuted between 1988 and 1994 and was based on the six-episode television series Police Squad!, which aired on ABC in 1982.

Rotten Tomatoes has now aggregated 57 different critics’ reviews of The Naked Gun, giving it a near-perfect Tomatometer score of 95%. While this score could fluctuate as more reviews are added, at the time of writing it marks the best of the entire franchise. The franchise’s previous high was the 91% score earned by the original Police Squad series.

What This Means For The Naked Gun

It Continues The Franchise’s Rotten Tomatoes H๏τ Streak

So far, 2025’s The Naked Gun has not been Certified Fresh on the platform, which would cement its success as a critical darling. This is an honor that has so far only been bestowed on the first and second movies in the franchise.

However, its record-breaking score is still remarkable, considering the fact that it is a full 30% higher than the lowest-rated installment, which is the third movie, Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. Below, see a breakdown of the Rotten Tomatoes scores earned by the entire multimedia franchise:

тιтle	RT Score
Police Squad! (1982)	91%
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)	88%
The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)	77%
Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994)	65%
The Naked Gun (2025)	95%

In addition to breaking this record for the franchise with its score (as it stands at the time of writing), it continues a longstanding tradition of Naked Gun installments being Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

In order to be considered Fresh, a тιтle has to earn 60% or higher, which the franchise has done consistently since its inception more than 40 years ago.

Our Take On The Naked Gun Rotten Tomatoes Score

Critics’ Individual Scores Show The Movie’s Potential

A review that has yet to be aggregated, but will add to this heap of praise, comes from ScreenRant‘s own Zachary Moser, who gave the movie a score of 8 out of 10. Read an excerpt from his review of The Naked Gun below:

Neeson is the draw, of course, channeling a comedic vein I haven’t witnessed since his scene-stealing cameo in the pilot for Ricky Gervais’ Life’s Too Short in 2011. His steely-eyed glare, combined with a refusal to wink at the camera, is admirable. It’s with his complete commitment that the most eye-rolling puns end up being deliciously funny jokes.

This all shows that The Naked Gun not only has the potential to live up to the original classics, but could eventually be considered to be one of the best installments in the long-running franchise.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes