The Taken actor has announced his departure from the genre after a decade of gleefully schlocky thrillers, but also one stone-cold classic

Non-stop action: why Hollywood’s ageing heroes won’t give up the gun

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So that’s it. Liam Neeson is no longer an action movie star. His retirement from action films, announced yesterday (“I’m sixty-fucking-five. Audiences are eventually going to go: ‘Come on,’” he said at the Toronto film festival), forms the conclusion of perhaps the most unlikely career jag in cinema history.

It would have been unthinkable to suggest, pre-Taken, that Liam Neeson – soulful, mournful, capital-A actor Liam Neeson from Schindler’s List – would spend a decade punching people and jumping over things in an apparently ceaseless procession of generic B-movies.

 

It would have been like suggesting that Daniel Day-Lewis was going to devote his life to gross-out comedy, or that Mark Rylance should sign up as the lead of a vampire gangster franchise called Bloodburst Hookers Extreme.

And yet, viewed from this side, Neeson’s action stint makes perfect sense. Although he enjoyed a four-year purple period in the 90s, during which he starred in Husbands and Wives, Schindler’s List and Michael Collins, a retrospective glance at Neeson’s filmography shows a hidden love of silliness right from the beginning.

 

His breakout starring role in 1990’s Darkman was a thrill precisely because he was already subverting a reputation that didn’t exist yet, cutting his well-versed sincerity with moments of gonzo ridiculousness.

 

And, honestly, you don’t sign up for a Star Wars film unless you inherently favour swooshing about with a glowing stick over hard-earned credibility.

But even taking these unexpected turns into consideration, Taken still came as a shock. On paper, Bryan Mills could have been played by anyone – a Statham, a Seagal, a Van Damme – but hiring Neeson was a masterstroke.

 

His credentials as a respected actor meant that he could sell the heck out the film’s early scenes – where his primary character trait was “sadsack” – to the point that you actually felt invested in his plight come the end. The film’s iconic moment is the phone call scene, the “particular set of skills” scene, which Neeson corralled into a virtuoso demonstration of controlled rage.

 

Put that speech in the mouth of any other action star and it’d be a mess; with Neeson it is a perfectly contained For Your Consideration package.

Not all of all of Neeson’s action experiments have been as successful as Taken. Far from it. Even though I watched Unknown in the cinema, I couldn’t have told you what happened in it five minutes after the credits rolled. I also paid to watch his A-Team revival, and I’ve only just remembered that it existed. Non-Stop was as generic as a film can possibly get.

 

Run All Night felt like it was created by an algorithm to refill the world’s bargain basement DVD buckets. Despite his rumoured $20 million salary, Taken 3 – with its infamous 15-shot fence-jumping scene – represented a horrible new low. It’s only right that he should decide to recalibrate his career back towards drama after such a mess.

Taking this into consideration, Neeson’s retirement should be celebrated.

 

He possesses such an astonishing range of ability that it doesn’t benefit anyone to confine him to such a narrow genre. In the last three years alone, he’s been breathtaking in Scorsese’s Silence, heartbreaking in A Monster Calls and flat-out hilarious in The Lego Movie.

 

The fact that he’ll soon be starring in Steve McQueen’s Widows seems to signify that he’s ready to show the world what an acting powerhouse he still is, and not a moment too soon.

However, if nothing else, Neeson’s action experiment did result in one unqualified success. If you haven’t seen 2011’s The Grey, then you must.

Depicted in the trailers as yet another schlocky action outing where Neeson tapes miniature vodka bottles onto his fists and punches a wolf, the film itself is an unexpectedly beautiful meditation on grief that comes out of nowhere and leaves you absolutely floored. Plus, he does actually punch a wolf with a bottle taped to his knuckles.

It played to Neeson’s strengths exactly. No other actor on Earth could have pulled it off. If nothing else, The Grey makes this last decade-long tangent worthwhile. If he wants to come out of retirement for a sequel, I’m sure they’ll let him.