Neeson rescues his career with a turn to self-mockery

With ‘The Naked Gun’, Liam Neeson has succeeded where Schwarzenegger and Stallone stumbled, playing for laughs after all those po-faced ‘Taken’-alikes, writes Xan Brooks

- Xan Brooks

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 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's God's way of telling his A-listers that their genre heyday is over; that it's high time they dropped their prop firearm and went off and found a fresh line of work.

Liam Neeson is the latest topflight action star 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's 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.

Neeson's performance as Lt Frank Drebin Jr in the rebooted