The “namby-pamby” death scene Liam Neeson hated shooting: “Oh, you got me!”
Everyone knows what a scary chap Liam Neeson is; he’s made a career out of coming across as the kind of guy you would absolutely never want to accidentally bump into at a bar, especially if you spilt his drink at the same time.
Ever since he moved past the Schindler’s List phase of his career, and certainly once he’d made the first of the Taken movies, Neeson has had the permanent air of a dad whose daughter has been brought home late from a prom, just one with access to firearms and/or probably some kind of martial arts training.
The amount of titles he has done now in which he has to single-handedly take on a small militia in the name of some minor indiscretion is almost on a par with Jason Statham; a cursory glance shows plenty that you usually find buried at the bottom of a Friday night streaming scroll, including, The Commuter, Cold Pursuit, Honest Thief, The Ice Road, Ice Road: Vengeance, The Marksman, Blacklight, Memory, Retribution and Absolution.
You don’t need to see most of these films to know what will happen in them; every single one of them also has the same cover art, which is Liam Neeson looking mildly angry, holding a gun. But the thing is, it’s fine. Like Statham’s movies, you know what you’re getting: a high body count, plenty of henchmen getting shot and falling down some stairs in a tower block, Neeson getting slightly injured but he’ll be fine, and some kind of scene at the end where emergency services are everywhere, and people are wrapped in blankets.
The problem, though, is that Neeson has made so many movies in which he is evidently deadly that when you go back to one of his pre-Taken films, it’s a bit harder to take him seriously.
Let’s examine, for instance, that controversial Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace at the end of the last century, when he donned some rather natty robes, got a half-up, half-down hairdo, occasionally wielded a light sabre, and hung out with a universally despised, clumsy seven-foot-tall CGI alien called Jar Jar Binks.
Not even quite a lot of energetic stormtrooper dispatching could make Neeson even remotely scary in those movies, and the man himself was quite disappointed at the way his character of Qui-Gon Jinn came to a messy end at the hands of the spiky-headed Sith Lord Darth Maul, telling GQ: “I thought my death was a bit namby-pamby. I’m supposed to be a Master Jedi. My character fell for the, ‘Oh, I’m going for your face! No, I’m not, I’m going for your stomach. Oh, you got me!'”
A rewatch of the scene in question shows that Neeson has a point. Maul bops him on the nose quite gently and then just sticks his light sabre into him, which is incredibly anti-climactic after two hours, especially when it prompts a fairly underwhelming reaction from fellow Jedi Ewan McGregor, who at that point was still dining out on Trainspotting to a frightening degree.
Meanwhile, Neeson fans who enjoy what he does best will be excited to know that he has not one, not two, not three, but four more of ‘those’ films on the way in the form of The Mongoose, The Fix, The Riker’s Ghost and Run All Night 2, each of which will involve someone in some kind of peril who will need him to intervene in very shooty fashion, just as long as he doesn’t have to run anywhere too far because he’s 74 years old.
