WHAT BLOODY HYPOCRITES
Teen rape. Sickening violence. Killing after graphic killing. Hollywood’s in a rage over Liam Neeson ‘racist’ revenge fantasy – yet glories in his movies’ vile content...
SOME believe Liam Neeson was just thinking he needed to spice up the chances of a rather mediocre new revenge film by causing a bit of a stir with his own tale of vigilante justice. But if that is the case, he’s certainly seen the error of his ways. It may well have killed his career.
The Ballymena-born actor, whose roles include Michael Collins and an air crash survivor pursued through the Alaskan wastes by a pack of hungry wolves, is prize prey once again, it seems.
Hollywood is howling for his blood after Neeson said that, many years ago, he stalked the streets armed with a cosh hoping to murder any black man after a close friend was raped.
The film industry is never happy unless it is fulminating self-righteously about some social injustice – in the past it has been anti-Semitism and, more recently, sexual harassment of women and the #MeToo movement.
The issue of the moment is race – particularly amid allegations that black stars and actresses have not been given the awards they have merited.
Of course, the Neeson race row offers Tinseltown a perfect chance to virtue-signal.
However, amid the frenzied reaction to his comments, Hollywood’s moral hypocrisy has been exposed.
While fretting about racism, movie moguls seem to have turned a blind eye to the pernicious effect that violent films – from which they make millions upon millions of dollars – may have on moviegoers.
Neeson, once considered so wholesome he was asked to voice the character of the Christ-like lion Aslan in the Narnia films – has long been churning out nauseatingly violent action films with hardly a murmur of dismay. At the same time, he’s one of many stars who have denounced US gun culture.
What might strike many as contemptible double standards is, sadly, just big business for an industry where presenting violence as entertainment has long been accepted as one of the surest ways of ensuring a film’s popularity.
NEESON, of course, is complicit in this. In 1999, he said he planned to retire from film acting – but has kept going, perhaps because he discovered he could make a mint as an action hero.
In 2008, he earned a reported $1million for Taken, the first of these film roles, in which he played an ex-CIA agent out to rescue his kidnapped daughter.
His fee for Taken 3, in 2015, was said to be $20million. The trilogy has had worldwide box office takings of $1.2billion.
The three movies include up to 80 killings – depicted in horrific detail: including audibly snapped necks and a man being impaled on a coat hook. Despite the increasingly negative critical reviews, Neeson has stuck to the violent movie genre – with Non-Stop, Run All Night, Unknown, A Walk Among The Tombstones and The Commuter. He is invariably seen carving a murderous trail through criminals.
There was also Gangs Of New York (worldwide box office takings: $194million), a 19th-century period drama set in the US city’s slums. The body count was 94.
It featured people beaten with clubs, and stabbed with cleavers, knives and axes. A woman was seen lunging at a man and ripping off his ear with her teeth.
A man tore open a rival’s cheek. And a young man hung from a metal spiked fence and several corpses are dragged and then hung on lamp-posts.
In Run All Night (takings: $71 million), about a mobster and former hitman played by Neeson, there are 22 deaths.
And in A Million Ways To Die In The West (takings: $86 million), 16 people are killed – including by being run over by a train and gored by a bull. During a bar fight, a man is killed by having his throat slit. Another has his head pounded against a bar. And a woman schoolteacher is killed when her throat is slit in front of her pupils.
Of course, there’s always a hoary cliché about a flawed protagonist seeking redemption for his sins – but it’s a redemption that involves killing people.
Neeson insists he isn’t just doing it for the money. He says he likes playing ruthless avenging angels, citing film roles by Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood as hard-man cop Dirty Harry. Their on-screen battles, however, look like a game of dominoes compared to his.
Anyone who dares voice concern about the effect of escalating film bloodshed is dismissed as a censorious philistine.
There is a shameful hypocrisy in seeing liberal-minded stars pontificating about the evils of Donald Trump’s pro-gun policies but insisting at the same time that there is no causal link between screen violence and the real thing.
Director Quentin Tarantino, one of the worst screen violence offenders, petulantly refuses to even discuss the issue, saying: ‘The bottom line is I’m not responsible for what some person does after they see a movie.’
Neeson made similarly fatuous remarks, once saying that he grew up watching cowboy films and ‘didn’t end up a killer’.
Generally in tune with Hollywood liberal orthodoxy, he says it’s ‘terrifying’ that there are 300 million guns in America.
HOLLYWOOD may look the other way, but evidence suggests some people are damaged by a relentless diet of watching people being hacked up or riddled with bullets.
Michael Morgan, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts who has examined media violence, said: ‘After every tragedy involving firearms, there is a period of hand-wringing – but the industry waits for it to blow over and continues as it’s been doing.’
As Hollywood’s big players now round on Liam Neeson, they are no doubt hoping a display of virtuousness can mask even worse sins.