Liam Neeson's 2021 Action Thriller On Netflix Is Perfect For Clint Eastwood Fans

There was a good decade-long stretch, from the 1970s into the 1980s, when Clint Eastwood was the most sought-after movie star in Hollywood. His name at the top of the cast sheet triggered an instant greenlight. There was just one catch: Eastwood developed his own material and made his movies through The Malpaso Company. The only time Eastwood loaned himself out after he'd become a cinema icon was for Wolfgang Petersen's crackerjack thriller "In the Line of Fire" — which paid off for everyone, as the movie was a box office smash and featured one of the star's finest performances.

As the 1980s approached, Eastwood was growing more and more interested in directing himself, but he still had a crowd-pleasing instinct that led him to make low-aiming comedies and actioners that he could entrust to one of his assistant directors. Eastwood's redneck hoots, "Every Which Way But Loose" and "Any Which Way You Can" were handed off, respectively, to longtime assistant director James Fargo and stunt coordinator Buddy Van Horn. The latter also called the shots on the last Dirty Harry movie, "The Dead Pool," and the skip-tracer romp "Pink Cadillac." Further down the road, Eastwood let Malpaso producer/AD Robert Lorenz direct the very bad baseball movie "Trouble with the Curve."

To be fair to Lorenz, "Trouble with the Curve" stinks on ice because it misunderstands the game of baseball. Technically, it's a sturdy piece of filmmaking. So when Lorenz departed Malpaso after 2014's "American Sniper," it's not surprising that he found career traction by making Eastwood-esque action programmers with Liam Neeson.

Robert Lorenz's "The Marksman" is a lean-and-mean B-movie about a former Marine sniper who's mourning the death of his wife while tending to a failing cattle ranch. He lives along the Arizona-Mexico border, which, one day, occasions an encounter with a mother and son fleeing a vicious drug cartel. When an ensuing firefight with cartel members leaves the mother mortally wounded, she hands Neeson a bag of cash and begs him to transport her son to relatives in Chicago, at which point you know exactly where this movie is going.

Film critic Matt Lynch correctly identified "The Marksman," which is currently the top-rated movie on Netflix, as the kind of red-meat, by-the-numbers programmer Eastwood knew a) his audience enjoyed, and, b) could also be comfortably brought to the finish line by a trusted associate. At 108 minutes, Neeson hits the mark as a seasoned, yet tortured killer who takes on a redemptive task knowing it will likely be his last. The action is competently staged, the bad guys get what's coming to them, and this undocumented child is left with family in Chicago — which, when "The Marksman" was released in 2021, meant something much different than it means today.

In 2025, I'd hope that kid had family in Toronto.