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In 2009, Pierre Morel’s mid-budget action-thriller Taken was released in the United States. It was a smash hit and instantly reinvented Liam Neeson’s career to that of an unstoppable action juggernaut. Since Taken, action movies bankrolled on Neeson’s new superstar status have become commonplace, with his newest thriller, Memory, coming out later this year.
Even though all of his post-Taken action movies range from awful to pretty good, there’s something that keeps viewers coming back for more. A Liam Neeson action film is a soft blanket to cozy up with at the end of a long week. Sure, there are holes and rough edges, but at the end of the day, it’s comfortable and you know what you’re going to get out of it. But here we must ponder the question, which of these Taken-inspired movies is worth your time, and which ones should be “eliminated?"
13. The Marksman (2021)
The absolute worst sin a movie can commit is to be boring. The Marksman is perhaps the dullest and most lackluster project Liam Neeson has ever been involved in. It’s equal parts Logan and Rambo: Last Blood; and it’s just as bad as the latter. You’ve seen this plot a million times, Neeson’s titular marksman comes across a woman and her son, who’re on the run from a drug cartel. He reluctantly gets involved and must protect the boy before the cartel tracks them down.
This is about as phoned-in as a movie can get. The script feels like it was written by an AI after being fed every underwhelming action film of the last decade. The editing and ADR work is particularly atrocious. There’s a lot to ridicule about a lot of the movies on this list, but none of them are as incompetent as The Marksman.
12. The Ice Road (2021)
Trucks. Big trucks. Big burly men driving big steely trucks. Liam Neeson gruffly saying “This time it’s personal!”. The Ice Road is a movie that constantly insists upon how masculine and cool it is, but just feels pandering and silly. In The Ice Road, Neeson plays a trucker tasked with driving life-saving equipment along treacherous, icy terrain from Winnipeg to Manitoba after a mine collapse leaves two dozen miners trapped. Absurdly, there’s also a secret assassin along for the ride, as if a convoy of cumbersome trucks voyaging over shaky ground isn’t enough conflict.
At its very best, there’s nothing in The Ice Road that rises above “meh”. Even the special effects are awful. Not one CGI crash, bridge collapse, or avalanche looks remotely convincing. On every level, it’s a sub-par experience. The score is overbearing. The characters are freezing throughout, and you can’t even see anyone's breath. It’s not even worth watching on a so-bad-it’s-good level, no-one at the helm seemed to care in the slightest.
11. Honest Thief (2020)
Honest Thief is a dumb, inconsequential mess that will constantly have you questioning how all the characters could be so foolish. Neeson plays Tom Carter, a thief who's stolen millions of dollars from banks but has never spent it. When he decides to come clean and hand himself in to the police, it catches the attention of corrupt cops (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) who try to steal Tom’s haul and take him out.
What makes Honest Thief so frustrating is that the entire conflict of the movie is a self-inflicted wound by Tom. If he didn’t turn himself in, no one would have been hurt. His crimes were victimless, so the entire movie feels contrived. Tom is 70 years old, it’s not unimaginable to think he’d be sent to jail for the rest of his life for his crimes, yet the movie treats his belief that he’ll be out in a few years as a given. For an intelligent thief who thinks about every contingent, he sure is ignorant about basic facts on the criminal justice system.
10. Taken 2 (2012)
In the proud tradition of Ghostbusters 2, Teen Wolf Too, and Escape from L.A, Taken 2 is another sequel that repeats everything from the original, just far more incompetently. If you’ve seen Taken, you’ve seen Taken 2. However, this time the camera is shakier, the plot sillier, and the hand-to-hand combat more incomprehensible. Neeson reprises his role as Bryan Mills, the deadly expert with a “very particular set of skills”.
In typical generic action movie tradition, the villains are nameless Eastern European mobsters set on killing Mills due to his actions in the previous Taken. It’s dumber and duller than the original, and the action scenes are so close and quickly edited that it’s obvious the filmmakers were trying to compensate for the lack of decent fight choreography. However, Liam does say “you’re going to be taken” in his gruff Irish accent as he does in the first movie, so it all evens out in the end.
9. The Commuter (2018)
In this 2018 flick, Neeson plays The Commuter, who is approached by a suspicious woman (Vera Farminga) who offers him a $100,000 reward if he finds a mystery passenger who was witness to a crime that could unravel a massive conspiracy. One of the most charming tropes of a Neeson action film is how convoluted the villains' plans are. The evil plot in The Commuter is the silliest out of all the picks on this list. The bad guys know every single detail about the person they’re looking for, except what they look like and what kind of bag they’re carrying. Instead of sending a hitman to kill the witness, the villains idiotically set a convoluted chain of events in motion that ends up exposing their whole criminal enterprise. It fits in the so-bad-it’s-good pile.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra directs The Commuter with far more directorial flair than his other Taken rip-offs, but that’s an extremely low bar, and not enough to save The Commuter from the countless flaws inherent in its script. This script is a masterclass in contrived exposition dialogue. If you think about the story for more than five seconds, you’ll spot enough holes to fill the Albert Hall. The best thing one can say about this film is that there is a pretty fun fight where Neeson fights off a man with a hatchet using an electric guitar.
8. Blacklight (2022)
Blacklight is about an obsessive-compulsive CIA ‘fixer’ coming to terms with the fact that he’s been a useful pawn for a corrupt institution for his entire career. It feels like a throwback to countless similar conspiracy thrillers of the '80s and '90s. It’s comforting to see Neeson still cares enough to give an impassioned performance after making so many interchangeable action thrillers, though Blacklight certainly doesn’t deserve him.
Blacklight is not a good movie, but it is perfectly watchable. It is home to some of the worst child-acting cinema has to offer, and unfortunately, there is a lot of it on display here. The gunfights are tainted by hilariously phony plug-in bullet VFX, and the ending is so easy and unearned that it might as well be a fairy-tale.
7. Taken 3 (2014)
Taken 3 is home to the most notorious fence scene in cinematic history. It takes 13 cuts for director Oliver Megaton to portray Bryan Mills desperately climbing over a wire fence. This hilarious, iconic cinematic moment perfectly encapsulates the follies of the Taken sequels. Taken 3 is, however, still better than its predecessor mainly because it isn’t just a carbon copy of the original. Mills is framed for murder, and he must fight against the government to uncover the real killer, clear his name, and get revenge for good measure.
After a certain amount of time, you have to wonder why anyone would continue to mess with Bryan Mills, given the fact he’s taken down multiple international crime syndicates without breaking a sweat. There are some lively moments, and the lovable Forest Whitaker makes a welcome addition to the franchise, but Taken 3 is still not great. Taken should have remained a one-off action ride.
6. Run All Night (2015)
In all respects, Run All Night is a pretty standard action thriller. There’s nothing particularly good or bad about the acting, directing, or other technical aspects of the movie. It’s just okay. The third of four Neeson vehicles directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Run All Night at least keeps your attention and keeps moving at a steady pace. Neeson plays hitman Jimmy 'The Gravedigger' Conlon, who has to protect his son from a mobster (Ed Harris) after Jimmy kills the mobster’s son.
Run All Night is predictable in every way. It also hurts that it has an alarming amount of similarities to John Wick, which came out half a year earlier. There’s a reason John Wick is an action classic and Run All Night is functionally non-existent in the cultural zeitgeist.
5. Unknown (2011)
Amnesia is one of the most overused crutches in all fiction, and one that gets dusted off once more to be at the center of Unknown. Unknown features Neeson as a man who gets into a car accident and can’t remember crucial details of his life. Even worse, his wife doesn’t seem to remember him. In typical action-thriller tradition, there is something sinister at play.
Unknown slots comfortably in next to Run All Night as a perfectly reliable action movie that leaves one’s memory 30 seconds after the credits roll. You can get the same experience plus so much more out of Steve McQueen’s Widows, also featuring Liam Neeson.
4. Non-Stop (2014)
If the Commuter is "Taken on a Train", Non-Stop is "Taken on a Plane". Non-stop is the best of the Neeson/Collet-Serra collaborations, though that’s not saying much. It’s essentially the same film as The Commuter, just with a more interesting hook and fewer plot inconsistencies. Liam is an air marshal who is thrust into a game of cat-and-mouse with an anonymous terrorist threatening to blow up Neeson’s plane. It has plenty of unintentionally hilarious moments, and the bad guy’s scheme would have gone off without a hitch if they simply didn’t troll the air marshal the entire time
The fight scenes in Non-Stop take place in cramped corners, so it’s far more believable when Liam can beat up people half his age than it is in the Taken sequels. Part of the fun is watching how convoluted everything gets. The problems keep compounding to the point of absurdity. It’s an entertaining whodunit that has a good supporting cast. It’s laughable, but a classic case of dumb fun.
3. Cold Pursuit (2019)
Finally, we get to the movies that can be considered genuinely good. Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Norwegian movie In Order of Disappearance directed by Hans Petter Moland. Moland directs this U.S. adaptation himself and does a fantastic job. Cold Pursuit is a rare case of a remake being better than the original. Neeson is Nels Coxman a Coloradan snowplow driver whose son is murdered by a Denver drug cartel. In classic Taken fashion, Nels takes them all down one by one.
What separates Cold Pursuit from so many other Taken clones, is how aware it is of its own ridiculousness. The villain, played by a scenery-chewing Tom Bateman, is so cartoonishly evil that you can’t help but think Bateman is playing the character ironically. There is also a healthy dose of fun and interesting side characters that never allow the film to be bogged down. It’s directed and edited with style and flair, something most Neeson 2000s films lack.
2. A Walk Among The Tombstones (2014)
Matt Scudder (Neeson) is a retired cop and alcoholic private investigator begged by a drug trafficker to find his wife’s killers. The hallmarks of a Neeson thriller film are all here; a troubled past, kidnapping, threat-filled phone conversations; the key difference is that there’s a legitimate creative spark so few Neeson action movies have. At the helm is Scott Frank, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Logan. Unlike most 21st century Neeson vehicles, it doesn’t feel like a cynical ploy made solely to cash in on Taken, though the producers certainly play up that angle in the marketing. Frank has a vision, and Neeson’s newfound action-hero status helped greenlight the project.
A disturbing mix of Se7en and Gone Baby Gone, A Walk Among the Tombstones is a surprisingly thoughtful, character-driven piece that doesn’t hold your hand. It’s not perfect, (the music can be intrusive, and some directorial choices are a little corny), but if you can get past the slow pacing, it’s a solid detective movie. It’s far more skilfully crafted than most other entries in this list. It’s not a perfect movie, Dan Stevens is miscast as the drug trafficker whose wife is kidnapped, but it is an underseen gem.
1. The Grey (2011)
During the height of Neeson’s action revival, The Grey became an unfortunate victim of a greatly dishonest marketing campaign that promised fans the film would consist mostly of Liam Neeson fighting wolves! After seeing the trailers, audiences were excited to watch Liam take down a pack of murderous canines with nothing more than his bare hands and tactical cunning. However, they were surprised by The Grey's sobering meditation of death and the unfathomable inconsequentiality of our lives.
The mendacious advertising cheapened what is ultimately a respectful, contemplative effort by Boss Level director Joe Carnahan to make the ultimate survival movie. There are death scenes in The Grey that shake you to your core. It’s a solemn reminder of how fragile life is and how arrogant humanity is when we believe we can control the brutality of nature. Neeson is fantastic as John, a depressed man struggling for answers from an unforgiving universe. The Grey is the best Taken-inspired action thriller in Liam Neeson’s catalog and features one of his best performances, period.