Liam Neeson in The shooter.
Photo: Open Road Films
Despite the theatricality of the action film of the latter part of his career, Liam Neeson has begun in recent years to age gracefully in his roles – so gracefully that he finally became Clint Eastwood. Inside The shooter, the actor exudes the kind of melancholy that Eastwood adopted in his Unforgiven in. Director and co-writer Robert Lorenz is himself a longtime assistant director and producer for Eastwood; he also directed Curve problemstarring Eastwood. Clint himself still makes a small appearance in The shooter, through one of his oldest films shown on a motel room TV. And truth be told, it is much easier to imagine Eastwood in this film than Neeson, whose clumsy strangeness doesn’t quite fit the role of a gray-haired Arizona farmer.
There is also a tiny conservatism that permeates The shooter this could have worked better with Clint. The film follows Neeson’s rancher, Jim, a former Marine, as he tries to protect Miguel (Jacob Perez), an undocumented Mexican youth who fled across the border with his mother (Teresa Ruiz), fleeing a drug cartel. When he sees his mother and son running to his property, Jim stops them and calls the border police. He does not lack compassion; he’s just following the law. But while they are waiting for the police to arrive, some cartel henchmen appear and kill their mother. The story revolves around the guilt that Jim feels for the incident: realizing the corruption of the border police and realizing that Miguel will be in danger if he returns to Mexico, he grabs the child and drives off to Chicago, where the child has a family. Cartel soldiers chase them, casually wreaking havoc and dropping bodies along the way.
It’s strictly good guy versus bad guy stuff: villains are very, very terrible, while Jim and Miguel are very, very decent. And as a minimal action film, The shooter it is mainly usable. But it’s also a road movie about an old man and a child getting to know each other, and the interactions between Jim and Miguel – ranging from angry silence to warm camaraderie – may have had more oomph with someone stronger, more confident, more Clint-y, on the older man side. Neeson’s raised eyebrows, his distressed behavior and concave posture always spoke of penance, or concern and hurt; that was what gave his reinvention so much power as an action hero. But it also means that your character has a lot less emotional ground to cover throughout the film, and the story of his guilt and his growing relationship with Miguel lacks drama; everything seems a foregone conclusion, even within the most predictable structure of this action film.
But the man has scope and I wish he had a better chance of using it. This is Neeson’s third film in less than a year, and lately I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about his career. He’s at an interesting point, for sure: a little old to be kicking his ass constantly, but still ranked in the lucrative films of the genre that revived his fortune a decade or more ago. Older actors – men and women – always need to find new ways to be relevant, and very few of them actually manage to do so. Neeson has always been a talented artist and, at his best, his action films employed his talents more than his skills (think The greyor same Run all night) But these things can only go so far, and I’m curious to see what he does next. Based on the evidence, however, he himself may not be so sure. The shooter it looks like a replacement for the next act in Liam Neeson’s career. It is a film about an elderly man who does not know what comes next, starring an elderly man who does not know what comes next.
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