Liam Neeson is taking over the lead role in the Naked Gun series from Leslie Nielsen. This makes some sense. If you watched his supporting turn in Ricky Gervais’s Extras or Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls, you will know he has a good line in deadpan comedy. The action roles he’s focused on over the last decade and a half provide him with a persona on which he can ironically riff. But he is in a very different place to Nielsen when he moved into comedy with Airplane! in 1980. The Canadian performer was a busy, but only modestly famous, “that...