He’s one of the finest actors of our time. A titan of the screen. A chameleon of emotion. A ball of cinematic putty that puts the “I am” in Liam – with a voice you could pour on a driveway.
Whether he’s rescuing his daughter from Albanian kidnappers, leading a rebellion against British rule, or saving Jewish lives from Nazis, Liam Neeson has built a career out of playing men who stand between danger and the innocent.
Now, he’s putting that particular set of skills to work in a new way – rebooting himself in the The Naked Gun reboot. We’ve not seen Neeson do slapstick, not yet… until now. “Liam is probably the only actor alive who in the 21st century could play Frank Drebin,” Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy creator and producer of The Naked Gun, told The New York Times, adding that only a handful of actors in history had the gravitas to pull off an “absurd” one-liner so it lands like a punch. Leslie Nielsen, the original Drebin, was of course another.
“The film is a giggle, and we need that, I think,” Neeson himself told the newspaper.
So, in light of all this, here’s something else we may need: a reminder of Neeson’s best films to date.
10 | Love Actually (2003)
One of the few, if not only, truly sympathetic characters in this orgy of festive chaos and questionable romantic decisions. Neeson plays a recently widowed stepdad trying to help his young son navigate first love – and somehow makes emotional sincerity cool. Six years after it was made, Neeson’s own wife, Natasha Richardson, tragically died in a skiing accident. “Plenty of times I’ve thought about this film and my own life,” he said in 2017. “Love Actually, that’s the way it is. That’s the tapestry of life.” Like it or not, it’s a classic of the genre.
9 | The Phantom Menace (1999)
It’s the one with the guy with the red head. Cinephiles call this a “space opera” – a symphony of light sabres, senate debates, and befuddling science meant to explain the exact biological framework that makes The Force possible. Somehow, Liam Neeson delivers lines about midichlorians with such conviction, you’d think he was quoting Wordsworth instead of space bacteria.
8 | The Lego Movie (2014)
It’s not exactly a “Neeson movie” – he’s more of a scene-stealing cameo, voicing the Good Cop/Bad Cop with his unmistakable growl. But it earns its spot here because, like him, the film is sharp, surprising, and full of charm. Warm, weird, and funny in all the right ways. It reminds that, even in plastic, Neeson brings presence.
7 | Ordinary Love (2019)
This is a quiet film about love, and how it endures through illness, routine, and the quiet devastations of everyday life. Neeson and Lesley Manville play a long-married couple facing a cancer diagnosis, and their performances are beautifully restrained – tender, lived-in, and achingly real. No grand speeches, no melodrama – just two people holding on to each other when there’s not much else to hold on to.
6 | Michael Collins (1996)
It’s got them all – Julia Roberts, Alan Rickman, Stephen Rae, Brendan Gleeson. But at the helm is Neeson as the titular hero in the aftermath of Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916, the founding of the IRA, and the violent battle of wits and skullduggery that ensued between Irish revolutionary forces and the British.
5 | Silence (2016)
In the 1600s somebody thought it would be a good idea to send missionaries to Japan to try and convert the locals to Christianity. It did not go well. They were heartlessly tortured and killed unless they renounced their faith. Martin Scorsese directs, with Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver in the front seats. Neeson plays a missing priest whose fate becomes a haunting question at the heart of the film – and when he does appear, he brings the full, grinding weight of doubt, compromise, and spiritual annihilation. It’s hard to stomach in places, stuffed with visceral, physical performances. But ultimately, just as Scorsese wants you to feel about faith, its rewards are worth the suffering. Vox called it “one of the finest religious movies ever made”.
4 | Batman Begins (2005)
The start of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and the film that reminded the world that Batman could be brooding and brilliant, creepy and crepuscular. Neeson plays Ra’s al Ghul, the mentor who becomes the enemy – a man preaching justice but through whose veins vengeance flows. “Men fear most what they cannot see,” he tells Bruce Wayne with gravel in his voice. “You have to become a terrible thought, a wraith. You have to become an idea… Embrace your worst fear. Become one with the darkness.”
3 | The Grey
Snow is frightening. Especially when it stretches as far as the eye can see, with no transport and little food. But do you know what is scarier? Being stalked by a pack of hungry wolves in the snow. This is a proper heart-pounder through the wilds of northern Canada, with Neeson as the hunter tasked with getting a bunch of oil workers to safety after a plane crash. Watch it on a warm evening, else you’ll feel its cold for days.
2 | Taken (2008)
Not the first, but certainly the best one-last-job movie of the past 20 years – the film that launched a thousand “particular-set-of-skills” blockbusters about retired agents/spies/coppers/assassins (you name it), thus relaunching almost as many flagging careers. And of course, it gave us arguably Neeson’s most famous line, and certainly the most famous one in revenge-flick cinema.
1 | Schindler’s List (1993)
The girl in the red coat. Oh boy, the girl in the red coat. Spielberg’s rendering of Thomas Keneally’s Booker-prize winning novel is considered one of the greatest (in a crowded field) holocaust movies of all time. Shot entirely in black and white (almost!), Neeson plays the German industrialist who risks everything to save more than a thousand Jewish lives – a role that earned him an Oscar nomination and cemented his status as a serious dramatic force.
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