‘Taken’ is an outlier in terms of this baker’s dozen list of action dramas and Hitchcockian thrillers.
While Taken was not the first time Liam Neeson had headlined an action movie (Darkman, Rob Roy and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace come to mind), the surprise sleeper smash over Super Bowl weekend 2009 began a new third-act for Neeson’s career. Not unlike Nicolas Cage, what began as a certain skewed irony (in Cage’s case going from winning an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas to starring in The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off) to conventional wisdom and par for the course. What made Taken unique and unusual (a lean-n-mean action thriller with Neeson as a man of action) has now become his stock-and-trade. As The Marksman opens in theaters today, exactly three months after Honest Thief, I looked back at Neeson’s post-Taken action hero run, well, counting Taken. I am bemused at A) how much Taken is an outlier in terms of this baker’s dozen list of action dramas and Hitchcockian thrillers and B) how often Neeson plays not an awesome man of action but a proverbial loser given one last shot at making a difference. In some ways, he’s actually spent the last 12 years making hybrids of Cary Grant’s North By Northwest and John Wayne’s The Shootist. And now, without further ado, I have used math, science and dark magic to correctly rank Neeson’s last decade’s worth of action movies. This is specifically for leading roles, all due respect to Clash of the Titans, Men in Black International and Widows. My list will not be your list, because what fun would that be? And as for future Neeson flicks, presuming he doesn’t retire from the genre quite yet, I want a movie where he embarks on a quest to rescue director Jean Collett-Serra from the clutches of Dwayne Johnson. Taken 3 (2015) Budget: $48 million Domestic box office: $89 million Worldwide box office: $326 million Olivier Megaton’s abysmal sequel is infamous for its “Liam Neeson takes 15 edits to hop a fence” action sequences. It’s also a lazy, ugly and cruel actioner that could qualify as a deconstruction of the Taken series (in which Bryan Mills not only fails to protect his ex-wife but indirectly causes her murder as part of a plot by the baddies to unleash his vengeance upon the alleged culprits) if it wasn’t so oblivious in its random chaos. Yeah, this one is easily Neeson’s worst action vehicle before or after Taken, so bad it almost makes Taken 2 look halfway decent by comparison. But don’t be fooled! Taken 2 (2012) Budget: $45 million Domestic box office: $140 million Worldwide box office: $376 million This Megaton-directed follow-up blows off the obvious sequel hook (seeing Mills and his mercenary pals doing a job) in favor of a skewed rehash of the first film. This “Bryan and his family are kidnapped while on holiday” actioner offers a few interesting ideas (that the first film’s wish-fulfillment violence comes at a cost as Neeson is targeted by the father of one of Taken’s many casualties) and one creative set piece (Maggie Grace saving her parents by tossing grenades out of car as a means of “Marco Polo”). But otherwise, it’s stinker of a sequel, unafraid to even commit to its interesting climax (whereby Neeson and arch-baddie Rade Šerbedžija agree to break the cycle of violence). The Marksman (2021) Budget: NA Domestic box office: NA Worldwide box office: NA Today’s newbie is in the same sandbox as Rambo: Last Blood, Blood Father and Logan. Neeson plays past-his-prime loner, a Vietnam vet about to lose his home and mourning the death of his wife, who is given a proverbial last chance to make a difference when he is forced to defend a child from nefarious forces. In this case, the kid is a border-crossing “illegal immigrant,” and the antagonists are Mexican drug cartel baddies. The film tries to have it both ways, offering a grizzled American hero who softens his heart on immigration while providing “bad hombres” for him to eventually kill. It’s sparse and unsentimental, but it’s also light on action and is so cavalier about collateral damage that you start to wonder whether Neeson should have just left the kid with the cops. The A-Team (2010) Budget: $110 million Domestic box office: $77 million Worldwide box office: $177 million This comparatively soulless TV-to-movie adaptation commits the cardinal sin of spending its entire running time as a prequel/set-up for the sequel that will never be.
