{"id":316883,"date":"2025-08-04T10:17:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T10:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/316883\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T10:17:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T10:17:16","slug":"the-naked-gun-liam-neesons-turn-to-self-mockery-has-rescued-his-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/316883\/","title":{"rendered":"The Naked Gun: Liam Neeson\u2019s turn to self-mockery has rescued his career"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> 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\u2019s God\u2019s way of telling his A-listers that their genre heyday is over; that it\u2019s high time they dropped their prop firearm and went off and found a fresh line of work.<\/p>\n

Liam Neeson is the latest top-flight action star<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Neeson\u2019s performance as Lt Frank Drebin Jr in the rebooted Naked Gun is his finest work in years<\/a>. 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\u2019s stint on Mount Olympus commenced with his performance as the industrialist-saviour in Steven Spielberg\u2019s Oscar-winning Schindler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It was Neeson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Neeson, to his credit, plays it entirely straight in The Naked Gun, a police spoof that is hugely \u2013 and more importantly, intentionally \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u201cman\u2019s laughter\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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). \u201cIt will either finish my career or bring it in a whole other direction,\u201d 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\u2019t have worried: the man\u2019s a comedy natural.<\/p>\n

With the benefit of hindsight, it\u2019s 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\u2019s A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) and made a lovely cameo in Derry Girls. He played dark versions of himself<\/a> on both Donald Glover\u2019s Atlanta and Ricky Gervais\u2019s Life\u2019s Too Short. \u201cI\u2019m a funny guy,\u201d he insists on the latter, marching into the office to improvise some stand-up routines. The joke here is that the star of Schindler\u2019s List turns out to be utterly humourless. But he plays the scene with such conviction that he brilliantly belies his public reputation.<\/p>\n

\"SpotSpot the difference: just a handful of the many Neeson vehicles to grace cinemas (or video-on-demand platforms) in recent years (Open Road\/Briarcliff\/EuropaCorp\/Samuel Goldwyn Films\/Code Entertainment\/Paramount)<\/p>\n

The obvious measure of good acting is that it doesn\u2019t look like acting at all, that one barely registers the effort involved, and so it is Neeson\u2019s latest volte-face, in which he flips from action hero to action clown without breaking a sweat. It\u2019s good to see Hollywood\u2019s former special-ops superhero gone bad. He\u2019s over the hill and he\u2019s picking up speed. He\u2019s 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\u2019s younger and freer than that now.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Naked Gun\u2019 is in cinemas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There comes a time in the life of every great action hero when the heart is still willing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-316883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114969984620765902","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}