One of these days, Liam Neeson will make good on his promise to retire from thrillers, and it arguably can’t come soon enough after the first reviews for In the Land of Saints and Sinners continued a trend that’s been haunting the grizzled throat-puncher for a decade at this point.
Even though it isn’t quite your standard Neeson fare, with the Academy Award-nominated veteran heading back to his roots to star in an Irish-set story that does admittedly find him on familiar ground as a retired assassin drawn back into the life he left behind when he gets drawn into a rivalry with a trio of revenge-fueled terrorists, the first reactions should be familiar for anyone to have long since grown tired of the leading man’s shtick.
For anyone that’s keeping count, that marks 12 consecutive thrillers dating all the way back to Taken 3 that haven’t been greeted with anything even remotely approaching widespread acclaim, and with box office bombs piling on top of box office bombs for his theatrical endeavors, maybe it’s for the best that In the Land of Saints and Sinners will be playing exclusively on Netflix in at least the United Kingdom and Ireland.
After all, The Ice Road performed so well on-demand that it ended up getting itself a sequel, but the last thing anybody needs at this stage is Neeson headlining even more widely-panned genre films. That being said, he’s still got Thug and Cold Storage on the horizon…