Cop show parody, The Naked Gun (1988) was classic Zucker brothers humour with silly word play, send ups of Hollywood clichés and surreal sight gags revolving around the bumbling Captain Frank Drebin’s (Leslie Nielsen) complete obliviousness to reality and capacity for unintentional destruction. The quality of the Naked Gun movies declined across the sequels but some people, including producer Seth
Read moreRetribution is another entry in that paranoid action movie sub-genre, the Liam Neeson film. As many will now be familiar, the formula for these films involves Liam as a seemingly ordinary guy suddenly being thrust into a deadly situation where he’s trapped in some form of transport with a mysterious fiend sending him cryptic messages and threatening to kill people
Read moreThese days, it’s almost a spoiler to use the term ‘Liam Neeson film’ as, for the last decade most of his movies have just been a waiting game for Neeson’s gruffly charming, taciturn character to reveal himself as an indestructible tough man on a morally righteous quest which usually involves shooting and beating the crap out of sneering scumbags. Honest
Read moreBefore it descended into torture porn and the mass slaughter of appallingly stereotyped swarthy Eastern Europeans, the first Taken film was a tense and exciting action/drama with convincingly visceral fight scenes, a darkly menacing Paris setting and a memorable lead performance from Liam Neeson who, as former CIA spook Brian Mills, beat up half of Europe to recover his kidnapped daughter
Read moreLiam Neeson’s latest film Non-stop will no doubt have had action junkies salivating. The no-nonsense title and a poster that features Neeson blasting away with a pistol in the middle of an aeroplane cabin, suggests a Taken-style parade of relentless and mindless action. Those who delight in cinematic carnage may, however, be slightly peeved to discover that, aside from a
Read moreThe original Taken stoked the fires of western paranoia toward Middle Eastern people with its depiction of a pretty white American girl being abducted into sex slavery by swarthy fiends. The film then one-upped all those morally dubious revenge films from Dirty Harry to I Spit on Your Grave by having the girl’s retired CIA assassin father (Liam Neeson) go
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