Having long since conquered the mid budget action genre on the big screen, Liam Neeson recently took his talents to Netflix when The Ice Road premiered at the end of June. Unsurprisingly, it topped the most-watched list just 24 hours after landing on the platform, but it was just the latest in a long line of his starring vehicles to have drawn in a massive audience on the world’s biggest streaming service, even if it was the first to debut exclusively.
Given his enduring fame as cinema’s premiere aging badass, it should be expected that any Neeson actioner is destined for a strong showing on the viewership charts, and history is repeating itself all over again now that The Marksman is rapidly making its way up the rankings, and can currently be found in seventeenth position.
Robert Lorenz’ feature opened at the top of the domestic box office when it hit theaters back in January, dislodging Wonder Woman 1984 from the summit while also giving Neeson the distinction of being the only name to headline two titles that topped the domestic rankings during the entire COVID-19 era, and for a while it reigned as the highest-grossing independent movie of 2021.
It’s about as standard as Liam Neeson fare can get, following a widowed rancher living a life of solitude on the Mexican border, only for him to dust off his Marine background when he tries to protect a young boy on the run from a drug cartel that’s pursued him into the United States. The Marksman has an underwhelming Rotten Tomatoes score of 36%, but the critical consensus doesn’t mean a thing when we’re promised the actor doing what he does best.