The dismal 1999 movie that almost made Liam Neeson quit acting: “I’m getting out”
Thanks to the words that have kept coming out of his own mouth, nobody really believes Liam Neeson when he says he’s giving something up, especially when he’s been saying it for almost three decades.
For the last ten or so of them, the veteran has repeatedly stated that his days as a grizzled action hero are almost over. Taken reinvented him as Hollywood’s marquee ass-kicker when he was in his late 50s, and he had every right to assume that it would be a short-lived thing.
However, because audiences kept showing up to watch the Academy Award nominee throat-punch his way through a small army, and because those genre films paid so well, he kept making them, and making them, and making them, and making them, to the point he’s now verging on self-parody.
A while back, Neeson said that turning 70 would be the catalyst for the end of his running and gunning days. Since turning 70, he’s headlined five action thrillers, with at least another two on the way. And to think, people genuinely bought into it when he said he was retiring from acting in 1999.
He had his reasons for feeling that way, though: he was knackered. After shooting Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace throughout 1997, with reshoots the following year, he dived straight into a stage production of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss in London’s West End and on Broadway in 1998.
After starring as Oscar Wilde in the play from March to April in the United Kingdom and then from April to August in the United States, he would then shoot Jan de Bont’s five-time Razzie-nominated remake of The Haunting from November until April 1999, after which he hit the promotional trail hard to hype the release of his Star Wars debut in May, before doing the same for the horror flick’s July bow.
“I’m getting out,” he said at the time. “I’m retiring from movies next year. I don’t want to do it anymore.” You can see why he felt that way, having been working flat-out for two years straight at that point, but after taking some time off, making only one film between The Phantom Menace and K-19: The Widowmaker, which hit cinemas three years and two months later, he’d changed his mind.
“It was something that came up from finishing a long period of work on stage and on film,” he confessed. “It’s not true. I was just venting a bit of anger.” That anger saw him slam cinema as “a director’s medium,” one that devalues actors to the point that “we are just basically puppets, walking around, hitting marks, saying lines.”
Had he followed through on his threat, then his last big-screen credit would have been The Haunting, an interminable and utterly redundant redux that fully deserved its ‘Worst Picture’ nomination. The Phantom Menace isn’t great, but it made money, which would have seen him leave covered in a little bit of glory, at least.
