‘The Naked Gun’ Just Debuted with a Perfect Score on Rotten Tomatoes
Really great comedy movies feel a little more rare these days. Studios aren’t willing to risk it on stories that don’t have some previously successful IP, which means we’re mostly stuck with reboots and sequels. So far that hasn’t exactly panned out for a golden era of comedy filmmaking. But something different might be happening with the reboot of 1988 film The Naked Gun. The 2025 version stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson and was directed by Akiva Schaffer and runs at a very trim one hour and 25 minutes.
While it’s not guaranteed to be a box-office hit, The Naked Gun has already done something pretty incredible: It had a perfect debut on Rotten Tomatoes. The first wave of reviews marked the film as 100 percent fresh, meaning that all of them were positive. Here’s how the Rotten Tomatoes site explains it: “The Tomatometer score represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show.”
Since the film’s initial debut at 100 percent, it’s dropped down to 93 percent, accounting for additional reviews filed since then that weren’t positive. But still, 93 percent is pretty high. And the individual reviews are all pretty positive as well.
This article not your thing? Try these...
“At its best, this new Naked Gun is a dumb, loopy delight, a return to the kind of comedy that was woefully taken for granted in its heyday and now barely exists at all,” Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson wrote. “Fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious,” Bilge Ebiri, from Vulture assessed. “See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.”
IndieWire’s David Elrich added, “The Naked Gun is the funniest new American movie I’ve seen in years.”
It’s unexpected, that this of all movies has become the highest rated comedy of the decade, but it’s certainly not unwelcomed. Comedy cinema has hit a real slump, and getting audiences back to the theaters to laugh has been hard when it doesn’t really feel like studios are too interested in making anything that funny.
People will still need to go and watch the movie in theaters if there’s any hope of getting a real re-investment in the genre beyond whatever Deadpool slop Reynolds is pushing out. But it’s easier to make that commitment when there’s a promise of actually laughing, not just groaning through a cynical cash grab and wishing you could get your $20 back.
Maybe soon, we can get a comedy that’s not a reboot, superhero movie or sequel.