Liam Neeson and the specter of Boomer masculinity
How America's most improbable action star reveals the insecurities of a generation
When Liam Neeson made the first Taken film in 2008, it was a strange little blip in his long career. Though he’d spent much of the last decade showing that he wasn’t above appearing in genre fare like Star Wars, Batman Begins, or the Narnia films, he was still a respected, serious actor, with Oscar, Tony, and Golden Globe nominations under his belt. After his acclaimed turn in 1993’s Schindler’s List, he’d appeared in several well-received adult dramas and worked with the likes Martin Scorcese, Kathryn Bigelow, and Ridley Scott. I would be surprised if Neeson thought this small-scale, kind of silly action movie about a 56-year-old retired CIA operative – a movie he thought was going direct to video – would go on to define the third act of his career.
When I first saw Taken, I was 22, and the novelty of Neeson elevating what Roger Ebert accurately called “high-quality trash” went a long way. My college friends and I thought the movie was pretty stupid but highly entertaining, and one friend and I made it a point to get together in subsequent years when the film’s two (much worse) sequels came out. In the meantime, however, a couple things happened: First, Neeson started making Taken-style action thrillers more and more often, to the point where they have surpassed his non-action output over the last 15 years. Second, I started watching more and more of them, and instead of just laughing at them, I began to find many of them pretty compelling.
Neeson’s inherent gravitas is a big part of the reason why; he’s a good actor, and he treats every role with credibility even if the movie around him isn’t very good. Another reason, however, is that this genre of Neeson film has increasingly served as a running commentary, intentionally or not, on the fragility of Baby Boomer masculinity. Neeson is Irish, but there’s a reason most of his action heroes are American – they are a barometer of whether the generation who has everything has still got that elusive, all-consuming it.
Most post-Taken Neeson movies fall into one of two categories: he’s either still got it, or he’s lost it forever. He’s never still had it more than in the original Taken, where his ex-spec ops honcho is just a nice guy whose wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) has replaced him with a richer, less dangerous upgrade. If Neeson’s Bryan Mills is a little emotionally unavailable, well, that’s a small price to pay for the violence (and, by extension, virility) needed to keep your family safe, and Bryan’s famous “particular set of skills” is quickly called upon when his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by Eastern European sex traffickers while she’s in Paris on an unchaperoned summer trip. Lenore’s new husband (Xander Berkeley) limply protests that they don’t need Bryan to go after her, that he has connections of his own, but Bryan quickly dismisses the idea, scolding him that “now is not the time for dick measuring.” Of course, if it was, the film implies, Bryan’s is definitely bigger.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the film was so popular, earning nine times its budget and spawning two sequels and a short-lived prequel TV show. Yes, it’s well-staged for a cheaply-made Western action movie, and Neeson is a talented performer, but it was catnip for the mid-50s men who were rapidly growing more conservative and more aware that their endless grip on American culture and capital wouldn’t last forever. It also manages to prophetically tap into the now-endemic clueless American obsession over sex trafficking masterminds, practically playing today as a modern Death Wish for the QAnon set. “It’s OK,” the film coos to its target audience. “You’re right to be scared of the world, but the world is no match for you, or at least the version of you that spent their career in the CIA.”
Neeson’s next several action roles still placed him in the role of the weathered badass, but as he entered his 60s, that began to change. For one thing, he’d never kept himself in godlike physical shape like Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves, and thus, his movies started to require that he play a badass who was not required to move very much for large stretches of time (whether via incomprehensible editing or by giving him stationary jobs like ice road trucker or retired sniper).
The smartest filmmakers to work with Neeson during this period leaned into his increased physical fragility, frequently pairing it with moral fragility as well. Before he was absorbed into making soulless franchise fodder for the studio system, for example, Jaume Collet-Serra directed a quartet of Neeson films (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night, and The Commuter) that found him increasingly grappling with physical obsolescence or a recognition that his ambitions and preoccupations had alienated him from his loved ones. Yes, there were still punches and gunshots – Non-Stop is the standout here, a blunt but elegantly-staged locked-room thriller on an airplane – but Neeson’s characters seem aware of the fact that unless they reorient their values, their best days are behind them.
Neeson’s best post-Taken vehicle, Cold Pursuit, weaponizes both the “still has it” illusion of his third-act star power and the “lost it forever” realities of a man showing his age. Hans Petter Moland’s remake of his own Norwegian film is a pitch-black comedy disguised as typical Neeson action fare, casting him as a rural Colorado snowplow driver who attempts to take revenge on a Denver-based gang who murders his son. Though he takes some pride in his important role in the community, Neeson’s Nels Coxman (whose name is but one of many pointed jabs at the pseudo-masculinity of the aging tough guy) is left completely adrift after his son’s death, deciding that, in the absence of something better to do, he might as well go about finding and killing the people responsible. However, because he is, after all, just a 67-year-old snowplow driver, he is pretty bad at murdering people. That doesn’t matter to Nels. The prerogative of the fragile Boomer male is the complete confidence that he can still do whatever he sets his mind to without being questioned by anyone, so Nels proceeds to off a few folks and inadvertently start a gang war, remaining completely clueless about the consequences of his actions for the entire film.
As the years have gone on, Neeson’s “lost it forever” films have begun outnumbering his “still got it” films, and I suspect audiences (particularly younger ones) have begun to tire of the schtick. Last year’s Blacklight (tagline: they’re gonna need more men) was a rare “still got it” feature and so poorly received that I wonder if the well hasn’t been permanently poisoned. Memory, a Martin Campbell feature which came out later in 2022 and starred Neeson as a hitman with early-stage Alzheimer’s, was similarly panned despite Campbell’s sturdy action staging and solid performances all around. This year’s Retribution, which features Neeson at his absolute stillest as a man confined to his car lest he triggers a pressure bomb, was also raked over the coals, even though I think it’s pretty good. Director Nimród Antal takes advantage of the movie’s limitations, spending seemingly half of his runtime with a camera shoved directly in Neeson's craggy, expressive face as he realizes that his workaholic lifestyle has put his family at risk and rendered him a stranger to them. It’s Boomerism at its most fragile, an action film by virtue of technicality.
I’ve spent this essay talking up the good Neeson actioners, but he’s certainly made his share of stinkers. I wouldn’t wish the likes of The Ice Road or Taken 2 on anyone, and besides that, it’s a bit of a bummer that such a talented actor has spent the last 15 years of his career largely turning out fare destined for a gas station bargain bin, even if many of those movies are secretly kind of good.
Still, this period of his filmography offers a frequently fascinating peek at how a segment of our culture sees itself, or at least how it wants to. It also has me curious about what his future films will look like as he continues to navigate his 70s. For years now, Neeson has claimed that his next one, or two, or three action films will be his last, but he has four in filming or post-production, including a sequel to The Ice Road and, more promisingly, a reteaming with Cold Pursuit’s Moland. Perhaps, like the protagonists he so often portrays nowadays, he’s unable to admit that time stops for no man, not even Bryan Mills.
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What else is good on the internet?
While Taken 3 is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, it is the source of one of my favorite moviegoing memories, thanks to a running, inelegantly forecasted thread in which Forest Whitaker’s detective character clears Bryan Mills of murder thanks to the temperature of some bagels Bryan purchased on the day of the crime. A Youtube hero has a supercut of all the relevant clips here, and it’s well worth the few minutes.
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From the vault
Here’s an old review I wrote of Cold Pursuit back when it premiered in 2019.
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