E ven over the phone, you can feel Liam Neeson ’s gravitas. It doesn’t matter that he’s hopped on the line for a “Last Word” interview loosely centered around his remarkable comedic turn in The Naked Gun reboot. This is still a man who’s played both Jedi master and Batman supervillain ; starred in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and reinvented himself as a late-career action star in Taken . So when Neeson responds to a simple, “How are you?” with a deadpan, “Worse,” it takes a moment to register that the celebrated actor is actually gunning for giggles.

The Naked Gun , which opened this past weekend, is one of the funniest big-studio comedies to hit theaters in years. And so many of its breathless, breakneck gags succeed because of the tension between our expecta

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