Family matters
Liam Neeson has had a long and prolific career. He’s dipped his toes into many famous franchises, including Star Wars and The Chronicles of Narnia, in which he portrayed Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn and the lion Aslan, respectively.
However, it now seems he has become known for being a generic action hero and a meme rather than for his acting prowess.
Today marks the DVD release of Taken 3. The film is the third entry in a franchise that has bafflingly grown out of the very bizarre idea that a man can have his female family members kidnapped by terrorists multiple times.
Though the sequels might be more or less the same as the original, Taken, which debuted in 2008, has earned a special place in the American lexicon due to Neeson’s portrayal of ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills.
The speech in which Mills warns kidnappers on the phone to let his daughter go has been quoted an infinite number of times, and not only by cinema buffs.
Even those who have never seen the movie can hear the first line, “I don’t know who you are,” and repeat back the whole speech through, “I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.”
Neeson’s performance as Mills in Taken has led moviegoers to draw comparisons between his career and that of legendary action hero Harrison Ford, and for good reason.
Neeson’s entire career seems to have taken a shift not unlike that of Ford’s.
Prior to his role as Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy, Ford’s career was a smattering of made-for-TV movies and indie flicks. However, after his debut as a half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, Ford’s career took off.
Though there were gritty dramas peppered between films like Indiana Jones and sci-fi epic Blade Runner, he slowly began to take on major roles in action and crime thrillers, such as Patriot Games in 1992.
Though Ford’s closest equivalent to Taken would likely be 1993’s The Fugitive, which is a highly dramatized version of the murder trial of Richard David Kimble, Ford started down the action movie path earlier in his career than Neeson, who is only 10 years younger than Ford.
However, like Ford, even with forays into comedy and drama, Neeson’s career has been forever been colored by this one role.
In the years since Taken, Neeson has played Zeus in Clash of the Titans and its sequel, Wrath of the Titans; he has revived his role of antagonist Ra’s Al Ghul in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises; and loaned his voice to several children’s movies, including the English dub of the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo.
Despite this, Neeson’s recent, seemingly constant appearances in films like The Next Three Days, Non-Stop and A Walk Among the Tombstones have reduced his career to a blur of generic thrillers and shootouts.
It’s easy to throw punches at Neeson for his increasingly generic filmography, but despite this relatively new shift into action heroism, Neeson seems just as in on the joke as everyone else.
His role in The Lego Movie as Good Cop/Bad Cop, the two-faced cop who runs the Super Secret Police, shows that Neeson is aware of how he has willingly typecast himself and is able to play along.
His gritty Bad Cop persona is a self-parody who mirrors many of the rogues he has portrayed in his recent slew of thrillers.
His humorous portrayal of both that character and the rarely seen, sweet Good Cop persona indicates that he is almost eager to continue going along with it — as long as audiences and filmmakers are still willing to keep carrying the joke.
