How Badass Is Liam Neeson?
There are other screen tough guys, ones who are better trained in stunts or more at ease looking like Rambo. Some of them are more pumped, some have more pithy one-liners, and others are more prolific. But in terms of over-60 stoic masculinity, Liam Neeson currently stands alone. He’s taken the gravitas and depth he cultivated as an Oscar-Nominated Serious Actor and used it to make a late-act career switch as AARP’s favorite action hero all the more ridiculous. This is a man who played Oskar Schindler and Zeus, who’s been up for Academy Awards and voiced literature’s favorite Jesus-Christ-Superlion Aslan in the Narnia films. Could anyone besides Neeson be the subject of the contender for Key & Peele‘s best ever sketch?
Eventually, the 62-year-old Irish actor became the rarest of things: a deadly serious badass, a punchline who was in on the joke. Before the release of his latest thriller Run All Night, we’ve taken a look back at 10 films that have helped create the Liam Neeson we know and love. Then we asked the question: Pound for pound, film for film, exactly how badass is he on the Neesonometer? You’re about to find out.
Darkman (1990)
Sam Raimi’s cult classic is genuinely amazing — a more or less original superhero movie, blending the decidedly bleaker future of the soon-to-be-omnipresent genre with its Gothic, arch recent past and way ahead of its time. And as Dr. Peyton Westlake, the obsessive (and obsessively practical) scientist who becomes Darkman, Neeson embodies the uneasy, manic spirit of the film.
After being burned beyond recognition by mobsters, Westlake has his sense of touch severed by an experimental surgery, giving him super-strength and super emotional instability. He turns to synthetic skin to disguise himself. Neeson gets to break a man’s fingers over a pink carnival elephant and get a henchman killed by disguising him as — wait for it — Liam Neeson. The over-the-top intensity of the movie and its title character is, in retrospect, a perfect encapsulation of the rest of the star’s career — a good actor hiding underneath layers of badass disguises. At the beginning of the movie, Westlake appears to be a respectable citizen working to progress his chosen field. By the end, he’s an enraged, brooding anti-hero, and thanks to the actor, one who’s destined for dark-knight hall-of-fame status.
Badass Rating: 8/10
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