There comes a time in the life of every great action hero when the heart is still willing but the flesh has turned weak. The leaps from high windows start to jar on the joints, those nocturnal car chases put a strain on the eyes, and a run-of-the-mill brawl with goons looks like elder abuse. It happened to Roger Moore on A View to a Kill (1985) and to stiff-necked Charles Bronson on Death Wish 5: Face of Death (1994), just as it will eventually happen to their 21st-century descendants. It’s God’s way of telling his A-listers that their genre heyday is over; that it’s high time they dropped their prop firearm and went off and found a fresh line of work.
Liam Neeson is the latest top-flight action star to join the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone on the list of expendables, although his fresh line of work is superficially the same as the last. There he is on the poster for The Naked Gun, brandishing a handgun and scowling out of the frame, much as he did on the posters for Run All Night (2015), Non-Stop (2014), Blacklight (2022) and Ice Road: Vengeance (2025). This suggests that there’s no discernible difference between a po-faced thriller and a clownish spoof. All it comes down to is a shuffle step to the left and a slight shift in perspective.
Neeson’s performance as Lt Frank Drebin Jr in the rebooted Naked Gun is his finest work in years. It also heralds a characteristically oddball third act for the 73-year-old star; a man who never looked entirely comfortable on the A-list anyway. Most actors aspire to big, prestigious productions and spend decades clambering up to that rarefied realm. Neeson, perversely, has mostly made the trip in reverse, figuring that a ride downhill tends to be more fun and exciting. The Ulsterman’s stint on Mount Olympus commenced with his performance as the industrialist-saviour in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Schindler’s List (1993), after which he was first on the speed-dial for any role that required gravelly gravitas, be it Aslan or Zeus, Rob Roy or Michael Collins, to a point, one suspects, where it began to grate on his nerves.
It was Neeson’s fate to ascend to Hollywood emeritus status when he was in his mid-forties. He might still be there today had he not wriggled free and found a new lease of life playing peeved killing machines. He assumed that the Luc Besson-produced Taken (2009) was going straight to video. Instead, it earned $230m at the theatrical box office and opened the door to a downwardly mobile middle period studded with such titles as Absolution (2024) and Retribution (2023), all of which featured the actor in various stages of vengeful fury. The bulk of these pictures took themselves very seriously. It was this very quality that sometimes tripped them up. Or as Moliere nearly put it: Taken 3 (2014) is a slapstick comedy to those who think and an anguished tragedy to those who feel.
Neeson, to his credit, plays it entirely straight in The Naked Gun, a police spoof that is hugely – and more importantly, intentionally – funny. His role as the deadpan LA cop picks up the baton from the late Leslie Nielsen (another one-time straight man who took a left turn into comedy), but the actor shrewdly steers clear of an impersonation. He’s mining (undermining?) his own screen image here: leaning into the joke as the script has him reeling between the sight gags and puns. Crucially, he sports the same pained, intense air that we recognise from Absolution, Retribution and any number of others, even as he confuses manslaughter with “man’s laughter” and disguises himself as a schoolgirl (replete with short skirt and a sharpened lollipop stick) to infiltrate a bank robbery. The performance clicks. The gags fizz and pop. We laugh at Neeson in part because the role retroactively pokes fun at his old action showreel. But it throws subtle shade at his lofty heavyweight roles, too.
It’s a high-stakes gamble, the pivot from action to comedy, and can result in a mess of turned ankles and bruised egos. Schwarzenegger fumbled a partially successful transition with the likes of Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990). Stallone crashed and burned with Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992). “It will either finish my career or bring it in a whole other direction,” Neeson told Entertainment Tonight back in 2021, just as the Naked Gun reboot was going into production and he was busy promoting a picture called The Marksman (2021). But he needn’t have worried: the man’s a comedy natural.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now apparent that Neeson has been circling the genre for the past decade or so; testing the water, limbering up for the plunge. He was the secret weapon in Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) and made a lovely cameo in Derry Girls. He played dark versions of himself on both Donald Glover’s Atlanta and Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short. “I’m a funny guy,” he insists on the latter, marching into the office to improvise some stand-up routines. The joke here is that the star of Schindler’s List turns out to be utterly humourless. But he plays the scene with such conviction that he brilliantly belies his public reputation.
The obvious measure of good acting is that it doesn’t look like acting at all, that one barely registers the effort involved, and so it is Neeson’s latest volte-face, in which he flips from action hero to action clown without breaking a sweat. It’s good to see Hollywood’s former special-ops superhero gone bad. He’s over the hill and he’s picking up speed. He’s living his career in reverse, turning his body clock backwards. I liked Neeson well enough when he was playing all those vengeful dads and wronged assassins, but he was mostly phoning it in, geared towards obsolescence. The man was so much older then. He’s younger and freer than that now.
‘The Naked Gun’ is in cinemas
