It’s not bad. The reboot of “The Naked Gun” tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick. Sample exchange: “I guess you can’t fight City Hall.” “No. It’s a building.” Also, kudos to any movie that finds a way to expand the cliché of the internal monologue voiceover, so that Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. suddenly has some competition on the soundtrack.

But there’s a “but” here — a gradually dispiriting air, with director Akiva Schaffer hunting for the proper tone, starting with his script co-written by Schaffer, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Some of that relates to the casting. Liam Neeson almost works as a Drebin for a new, coarser, meaner age, and he has no problem suggesting a surly, disgruntled son of the cop immortalized by Leslie Nielsen in th

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