Liam Neeson stars in The Naked Gun, a reboot of a nearly 40-year-old franchise.Frank Masi/The Associated Press
He has one very particular skill, a skill he acquired over a long career: Liam Neeson understands that the fantasy of flinty macho toughness he’s been shilling since Taken (2008) is this close to parodic. And now that he’s 73, he knows that his best option is full-on parody – playing Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. in The Naked Gun, the new reboot of the nearly 40-year-old franchise, which starred Leslie Nielsen.
I didn’t think Neeson’s career would go this way. When he hit my radar in Satisfaction (1988), I thought he was going to be the next Richard Burton. A lady-killer, he’d been squiring around Helen Mirren, seven years his senior, and then took up with Julia Roberts, 15 years his junior.
With an ASMR purr of a voice, a body that unfurls to 6 foot 4, a boxer’s dented nose and an absolute anvil of a head, he was a soulful hunk of jolie laide, a gruff/tender, Northern Irish working-class hero. In 1993, he starred in both Schindler’s List and a lauded Broadway production of Anna Christie. A still from his play – shirtless, in fishermen’s overalls, his meaty hands wrapped around the flanks of Natasha Richardson (his future wife, now sadly deceased) – went analog-viral.
He made a Woody Allen movie (Husbands and Wives), a Jodie Foster movie (Nell), a Meryl Streep movie (Before and After) and a Sandra Bullock movie (Gun Shy). He led a pair of historical epics (Rob Roy and Michael Collins); landed recurring roles in three megafranchises (Star Wars, Batman, Narnia); worked with Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese and Bill Condon; and had one of the least embarrassing plotlines in the icky perennial Love Actually. I dubbed him Lord Liam in a Vanity Fair cover story, accompanied by glamour photos shot by Herb Ritts. In other words, he was on track to be a classic leading man.
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And then…Taken. A US$25-million French actioner about a father mowing down the Albanian villains who are trying to sex-traffic his daughter, it’s a meat mallet of a movie, a blunt-force trauma that marches grimly from “I will hunt you” through “I will find you” to “I will kill you.” Though AI obviously didn’t exist then, it’s as if someone asked it, “Write a Bourne movie, but without any meaning, artfulness or soul.” Neeson thought it would be a “little side road” in his career. Until it grossed US$226-million.
There’s a scene early in Taken 2 where Neeson’s character – who is both a former Green Beret and a former CIA operative, in case you were wondering if he could be any more manly – is handed a wad of cash, which he pockets, chortling. I imagine that scene happened IRL when Neeson’s agent handed him the paycheque. Thus began his Leather Jacket Years, movie after movie in which his character is a gangster/private investigator/government operative/assassin/marksman who seeks vengeance/defends his turf/takes on one last job. The posters all have guns, bruises or bullet holes in them. The henchmen body count is insanely high, and the only women are the ones in peril.
Neeson’s brutes vanquish scores of enemies, five, 10 at a time; they never get shot, never run out of bullets and even when tortured, never get truly hurt. They’re steely calm in chaos, their senses and memories are preternatural, and they produce cool gadgets from hidden pockets at opportune moments. They love their families fiercely, but feel no compunction to rescue anyone else, for example, those dozen drug-addled young girls in Taken left handcuffed to their beds. It’s a vision of ruthless male competence so aggrandizing it would be funny if it wasn’t so ugly.
Along the way, Neeson made the odd non-action film, including one drama, Ordinary Love (2019), so delicate it broke my heart for what he could have been. But that side road became his main road. Asked why in 2013 at a TIFF press conference for the film Third Person, Neeson mimed being on the phone, discussing an offer. “How much?” he asked, then grinned and said, “Okay!”
Yet he also mocked his thuggish persona, gleefully. On Ricky Gervais’s celeb-skewering series Life’s Too Short, Neeson played a version of himself unable to perform a comic improv that didn’t end in bleak death. On Stephen Colbert’s show, he had a recurring gig playing menacing holiday figures: in a Santa suit, growling, “He’s making a list”; as the Easter Bunny, threatening, “Easter’s on its way”; as Cupid, touting his “kill shots” to the hearts of prospective Valentines.
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In 2014, the parody specialist Seth MacFarlane began hiring Neeson: as an infamous outlaw in A Million Ways to Die in the West; as himself, beating up Peter on Family Guy; as a shopper in Ted 2 conspiring darkly to buy Trix even though “they’re for kids.” As a producer, MacFarlane developed The Naked Gun with Neeson in mind, turning that ego-stroking vision of competence into a pants-down mockery of it.
In the original Naked Gun trilogy, Nielsen (whose name is often jokingly confused with Neeson’s) played Drebin Sr. like a bumbling Bond, a man certain he’s suave, unaware of the cascade of calamities he leaves in his wake. Drebin Jr. aspires to be grittier, a disaster-prone Dirty Harry. He vanquishes two nasties – played by Danny Huston and Kevin Durand, also parodying their own villain personas – and gets the girl, played by Pamela Anderson (whom he is reportedly dating off screen).
Neeson and the film, directed and co-written by Akiva Schaffer, are onto how ridiculous the badass-with-a-gun trope is – “I guess old white men are the toughest smartest, sexiest beings on the planet,” Drebin Jr. deadpans near the end – and they make giddy hay of it. Unfortunately for me, though, there are just too many vigilante-wannabes roaming North America right now, with all-too-real automatic weapons, to relax into a joke version.
And whoops, a glance at Neeson’s current and coming projects proves that parodying himself in The Naked Gun absolutely did not cow him into retiring from squint-eyed machismo. He’s playing or about to play an avenging ice road trucker; a decorated combat vet named Fang who flees a murder in a Mustang Shelby Cobra; a convict who has to break a terrorist out of prison; a reprise of his hitman Jimmy (the Gravedigger Condon; a disgraced war-torn CIA operative; a grizzled bio-terror operative; and a bank-robbing grandpa. I guess acting the alpha male never grows old. Especially if there’s a fat wad of cash to pocket.