Open Road Films has another Liam Neeson movie in the chamber and is ready to take aim at action fans with a new trailer for The Marksman. In the Robert Lorenz-directed film (Trouble with the Curve), Neeson plays Jim, a hardened rancher in an Arizona border town who helps a young boy escape across America while being chased by the leaders of a Mexican drug cartel.
Here's the official synopsis for The Marksman:
Hardened Arizona rancher Jim Hanson (Liam Neeson) simply wants to be left alone as he fends off eviction notices and tries to make a living on an isolated stretch of a borderland. But everything changes when Hanson, an ex-Marine sharpshooter, witnesses 11-year-old migrant Miguel (Jacob Perez) fleeing with his mother Rosa (Teresa Ruiz) from drug cartel assassins led by the ruthless Mauricio (Juan Pablo Raba). After being caught in a shoot-out, a dying Rosa begs Jim to take her son to safety to her family in Chicago. Defying his cop daughter Sarah (Katheryn Winnick), Jim sneaks Miguel out of the local U.S. Customs and Border Patrol station, and together, they hit the road with the group of killers in pursuit. Jim and Miguel slowly begin to overcome their differences and begin to forge an unlikely friendship, while Mauricio and his fellow assassins blaze a cold-blooded trail, hot on their heels. When they finally meet on a Midwestern farm, a fight to the death ensues as Jim uses his military skills and code of honor to defend the boy he’s come to love.
In talking about Neeson remaining a bankable action star for Open Road Films, the studio's Tom Ortenberg said, “In addition to being one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Liam Neeson has been a good luck charm for Open Road. Our first #1 film was the Liam starrer The Grey, and almost nine years later, Liam headlined Honest Thief, which spent 2 weeks as the #1 movie in America this October. We expect similar success with The Marksman, a terrific film by Robert Lorenz, that combines the action we expect from Liam along with a deeply-drawn character study of the human condition.”
Does anyone recall when back in 2017, Neeson said that he was retiring from action films? "Guys, I'm sixty-fucking-five," were Neeson's exact words at the time. Perhaps the funniest part about Neeson's proclamation is that I don't know a single person who believed him at the time, and now here we are, several action films later. For what it's worth I'm glad that Neeson is still applying his certain set of skills to the action scene. He's certainly still got the chops and gravitas to pull the genre off, so why not throw whatever we can at him until it's time to bust out a walker? Some would call this elder abuse but I think that so long as Neeson is game, we should let him continue doing what he does best: a vaguely Irish accented stream of threats followed by excessive gunplay and a trail of bodies.
Briarcliff Entertainment will release The Marksman in theaters on Jan. 22, 2021.
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