Neeson has earned a star for his second act
Rebranded as a quiet, lean action star paid nice dividends for Irish actor
The surprise second act of Liam Neeson's career, which continues with the Netflix thriller The Ice Road, has left the old Neeson of historical dramas (Schindler's List, Kinsey, Michael Collins) and lighter fare (Love Actually) behind, rebranding him as a quiet, lean, ruthlessly efficient action star. Although Neeson had proved himself a capable fighter in the past, he fully reinvented himself in his mid-50s, with the hit 2008 thriller Taken. In the 13 years since, he has been credibly breaking bones and shooting scoundrels at about a movie-a-year pace. This second act has developed its own mini-arc, one that speaks to Neeson's evolving presence as an action star and to the shifting priorities of the Hollywood studio system, which is no longer able to accommodate him.
Although Taken feels like a quintessentially American film, it started with Luc Besson, the prolific writer, producer and director who revolutionized French mainstream filmmaking with La Femme Nikita in 1990. That Taken was a smash proved that Besson, who co-wrote the script and produced the film for director Pierre Morel, had a keener understanding of American appetites than Hollywood did. As a former Green Beret and CIA officer who hunts down the sex traffickers who kidnapped his 17-year-old daughter in Paris, Neeson established a template that would repeat itself in roles to come: the bruised loner with “a particular set of skills,” either divorced or widowed or otherwise emotionally inaccessible, with a sense of justice that places him outside the law. There's that residue of sensitivity that separates Neeson from the more cold-blooded action stars of the past — he's still that humble dad — but he's ruthless and resourceful, a steelyeyed creature of vengeance.
He's still that humble dad — but he's ruthless and resourceful, a steely-eyed creature of vengeance.
Building a franchise around the very specific premise of a family member getting kidnapped is as strained as it sounds, but about $225 million in worldwide grosses led to two sequels and an origin-story series on NBC without Neeson. Although the Taken movies are mostly risible, Neeson's persona connected with audiences and his old-school masculinity inspired more talented filmmakers to seize on his popularity. Director Joe Carnahan cast him as John “Hannibal” Smith in his disposable big-screen revival of The A-team, but both men seemed significantly more invested in The Grey, a survival film that pits Neeson's huntsman and a team of Alaskan oil workers against a blizzard, several wolf packs and mutinies from within.
The mass paperback quality of most Neeson thrillers probably accounts for why they've found such a consistent audience: He always delivers the goods. The four films he has made with the talented Spanish American craftsman Jaume Collet-serra have titles so generic that they're better remembered by their loglines. There's the Hitchcockian one with the mistaken identity (Unknown), the one on the plane (Non-stop), the one on the train (The Commuter) and the one where he's a hit man pitted against his mob employer (Run All Night). All sleek and tightly constructed, all packed to the hilt with quality character actors, all the type of films you'd happily watch for half an hour before realizing you'd already rented them before.
There have been signs interest in Neeson vehicles are on the wane, even as he has subtly edged into the types of roles that Eastwood played in recent films such as Gran Torino and The Mule, ornery older men who are brought reluctantly out of their shells. Neeson snuck a couple of movies out during the pandemic — Honest Thief and The Marksman — that signalled a shift away from physically demanding roles as he approaches 70, leaning more on his soulful, world-weary presence.
All of these newer films fell to second-tier distributors such as Open Road or Lionsgate, because Hollywood doesn't have an interest in the modest profit-turners that were the core of their business back when grizzled heroes like Neeson were more common. There's hope that streaming services such as Netflix, with their ceaseless thirst for content, will step in with more movies like The Ice Road. It's only fitting that Neeson the action star is a gun for hire, drifting on the dusty margins of the industry and taking the jobs when they come.