Hard to imagine a film actor acquiring action movie chops about the time his first AARP card comes in the mail. If you weren’t working those action genre muscles from your physical prime, it’s probably past ‘sell date’ to start pummeling bad guys or single-handedly taking out drug cartels and having an audience buy it. But then there’s Liam Neeson, growing only more believable as a physical presence with each staggered step and exhausted punch. TAKEN/’08 the one that got this late career surge going; after that, all diminished returns. Right? Well, actually no. Diminished returns for official TAKEN sequels & unofficial reboots, but others working territory a bit to the side can look as good or even better than the progenitor. Ergo, NON-STOP. A thriller, half suspense/half whodunit (best on the whodunit side), finds Neeson working undercover as an Air Marshall who’s seen better days: Family lost/Alcohol found. Here, he’s fighting an unknown nutcase, one of 150 passengers & crew on an international flight he’s working, threatening to kill someone every twenty minutes if he doesn’t get 150 mill. Yikes! Cleverly worked up by director Jaume Collet-Serra* & scripters John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach & Ryan Engle, the plotting and murders are complicated enough to earn some bad laughs as it hurtles along, and there’s too much rubbery CGI effects at the explosive ending, but a remarkably strong cast for the genre and Neeson’s craggy authority when in personal distress keep it together.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Neeson and Collet-Serra followed next year with RUN ALL NIGHT/’15. The first of these Neeson action films to fail commercially; naturally it’s the best of the lot. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/run-all-night-2015.html
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