Men at Work

Which is funny, because just down the hall, Liam Neeson is appearing in A Walk Among the Tombstones, a pretty good film in which he faces down a knife-wielding, snuff-porn-addict grave-digger with the I’ve-seen-everything-and-done-everything anomie that typifies the actor’s surprising late-career emergence as a movie star. Meanwhile, a trailer just popped up online for a film called (so help me God) Tak3n, in which Neeson’s character will once again display his “particular set of skills”—among them the willingness to shoot an innocent woman in the arm to force her husband to provide a relevant piece of information.

The Equalizer is a hit; A Walk Among the Tombstones is not. What they share, however, is a downbeat tone, ultraviolence, and two formidably convincing leading men who would already have been retired on a full pension for a decade if they lived in Greece. Washington is 59, Neeson is 62, and there is no one who can touch either of them when it comes to the action genre.

This is odd. When John Wayne hit 60, he had begun to seem ridiculous climbing into the saddle or aiming a gun; indeed, it was just that ludicrousness that made his performance as an aging wreck of a federal marshal in True Grit (1969) so touching. The same was true of Henry Fonda, who tried to be Clint Eastwood a few times in the 1960s, and of Kirk Douglas, who made a laughingstock of himself as an ex-CIA agent in The Fury (1978). Well, you might say, 60 wasn’t the new 40 back then; but even in the past decade, Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro have all embarrassed themselves when they tried to recapture the old magic of their younger, gun-toting, beating-guys-up days while receiving Social Security. And there was nothing quite so absurd as the team-up of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the tough-guy prison movie Escape Plan (2013), their faces as immobilized as any Botoxed Beverly Hills matron.

So what is it about Neeson and Washington? First, they both happen to be exceptionally good actors, even when they’re slumming. I’ve said before in these pages that Neeson gave one of the towering stage performances of my lifetime in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 2002, and he was almost as good playing Oscar Wilde in a David Hare play called The Judas Kiss a few years earlier. Washington is not the stage actor Neeson is, but you would be hard-press-ed to find anyone else in Hollywood who could have played his three best parts over the past 30 years: his Oscar turns as the runaway slave-turned-soldier in Glory (1989) and as a dirty cop in Training Day (2001) and his should-have-been-Oscar turn as an alcoholic pilot in Flight (2012). 

Of course, Pacino and De Niro are no slouches in the acting department. But Washington and Neeson have two things they lack. First, they are almost entirely without mannerism, which is important because they do nothing that comes across as self-parodic. And second, both have immense physical authority. You might think that this would be a quality any great actor could infuse himself with, or something a skilled director and his editor could help an actor convey. Not at all.

Just as in real life, authority is a mysterious thing. It’s not clear it can be faked or mimicked. But it seems to deepen with age, and this is the key to understanding why it is so pleasurable to watch Washington and Neeson do their worst—even when they’re in bad movies. They are the opposite of callow, unformed, smart-alecky, quippy, and jokester-y, which is what most action-movie types are like today. Nor do they need to turn on the intensity, the way Tom Cruise and Will Smith do when they want to seem like formidable adversaries. If anything, Washington and Neeson turn it down a notch.

In other words, they’re men.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.