Other veteran actors are vying for his crown, but Run All Night proves Neeson’s still got the skills — a very particular set of them.
Liam Neeson in Rull All Night.
Myles Aronowitz / Warner Bros.
In The Gunman, opening in theaters on March 20, 54-year-old Sean Penn actually shows more skin than his love interest (played by Italian actress Jasmine Trinca), who's two decades his junior. He crouches shirtless over a surfboard off an African coast. He broodingly, shirtlessly surveys himself in a bathroom mirror. He straps on a Kevlar vest with nothing underneath. There's something novel, in a tables-have-turned sense, in seeing an actor as self-serious and established as Penn be subject to the kind of idly assessing gaze more often reserved for The CW stars. But it's also irrefutably weird to see Penn's weather-beaten mug on top of that bulgy torso, like someone popped off and swapped the heads of two mismatched action figures.
The Gunman is a vaguely Bourne Identity-type thriller involving conspiracies and European locales, so the impressive shape into which the two-time Oscar winner has gotten himself to play a former Special Forces soldier turned military contractor is somewhat called for. But Penn's burliness isn't just about showing off — it's about auditioning for the unofficial, but coveted role of Next Big Middle-Aged Action Star, a part that's revealed itself to be surprisingly viable over the last few years. The Gunman is supposed to be Penn's Taken, albeit a little more tasteful and more tied into grim global realities. It even has the same director, Luc Besson protégé Pierre Morel, who takes aim at something less daffy but just as action-centric in this adaptation of a Jean-Patrick Manchette novel.
The reigning Middle-Aged Action Star is (though it needn't even be said) Liam Neeson, who was never a stranger to the genre — see him in 1995's Rob Roy for what may be the best sword fighting scene of all time. But starting with Taken, the now 62-year-old Irish actor has experienced a delightful career resurgence playing, basically, the baddest dad of all time, even in movies where his character isn't actually a father. Neeson's become an unlikely but wonderfully satisfying action hero in a string of movies that have, admittedly, started to blur a little in all their hard-drinking, gun-wielding, sad-eyedness. It's a run the actor seems ready to call a halt to soon, if his widely quoted line in a recent Guardian interview holds true: "Maybe two more years. If God spares me and I'm healthy," he told the paper. "But after that, I'll stop."
Sean Penn in The Gunman
Open Road Films
No comments:
Post a Comment