HE strongly suspects that a majority of the haters who saw red yesterday and went crazy toxic over a mild-mannered notion that Liam Neeson ought to take certain measures in order to look 63 again…
HE strongly suspects that many of these meltdown cases haven’t even caught one of Neeson’s finest films ever, 2024’s In The Land of Saints and Sinners, much less urged their friends to see it or talked it up on HE or whatever.
Some may have seen and admired it, I’m guessing, but the others need to wake the fook up.
In The Land of Saints and Sinners is “a Liam Neeson movie,” and we all know what that means. It means adherence to a certain slow-build formula.
Repeating for the record: To a steady and stalwart Neeson fellow who’s not looking for trouble and in fact would like to back off into a shelter or backwater of some kind, shit inevitably happens.
A slow burning, a gradually tightening situation, implications of tough terms, bad people up to bad stuff (including the threat of serious harm to a couple of innocent characters as well as to Neeson’s guy) until it all blows up in the end.
But the story, set in rural Ireland in the mid ’70s, pulls you in bit by bit, and the script has been carefully and compellingly written by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.
In The Land of Saints and Sinners began shooting in Ireland (County Donegal, Dublin) in March ‘22. It premiered 18 months later at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Netflix began streaming it on 4.26.24.