My own personal Liam Neeson boycott

I read with no small amount of shock the comments Liam Neeson has made about his desire to commit race-based revenge some years back.

At the time I read it, I was tossing up whether to make his latest thriller, Cold Pursuit, my first theatrical movie of 2019, or to select the other movie released today, Escape Room. I’ll be reviewing whichever film I see. And I was only nine hours away from having to make the decision at the time I read it.

I had been leaning toward Cold Pursuit, but Neeson’s comments made my decision easy.

If you aren’t familiar with what he said, unprompted, to an interviewer, it was that a friend of his had been sexually assaulted while he was abroad. When he returned home, he asked about the skin color of her unknown assailant and learned he was black. He then went around – for a whole week, by his own admission, with concealed weapon in hand – hoping a black guy would start something with him on the street so he could commit a kind of vengeance by proxy.

Wow.

The problems with this are so many that I don’t know where to start, but let’s be generous and start with something in Neeson’s favor. Although it was, or could be, a kind of career suicide to have done so, Neeson deserves some credit for coming forward with this story, though you wouldn’t think it would be necessary purely for selling the movie. He’s made about 22 revenge thrillers before this, and never before now did he feel it was necessary to haul out this story, to try to scare up a few additional bucks by suggesting the ways he identifies with the character he’s playing. His movies do pretty well for movies that are almost always released very early in the year. But still, I do appreciate his attempts at being forthright, on some level.

What’s completely short-sighted about the whole thing is that he thought was confessing to one thing and was really confessing to another. It’s almost what a #metoo accused would do, trying to get ahead of negative press by confessing something lesser, though in this case nobody would have ever found out about it had Neeson not felt compelled to reveal it to us completely out of nowhere. Neeson thought he was confessing to the shame of having murderous, revenge-driven thoughts. Instead, he was confessing to the worst kind of racial profiling, one where it doesn’t even matter to you if you’re enacting your vengeance against the correct person, as long as he has the same skin color as that person.

Why in his story did Neeson even need to ask his friend what her attacker’s skin color was? Was that going to make it more likely for him to find the correct person? Or was he doing it for the same reason that we all look over at the person who was driving like an idiot once we’ve passed them, to see if that driver conforms to some kind of deep-seated prejudice about the types of people we think are more likely to be bad drivers? Did Neeson want to know if it was a “black bastard” (using his own words from the interview, which he presented with air quotes) because he assumed only someone like that could commit a crime like this? More likely was that the characteristics of her assailant came up more organically in the discussion of what happened, but Neeson himself presented the story as him having asked for that detail. Dumb.

So yeah, I’m seeing Escape Room tonight.

The temptation would be that this would actually prompt me to see Cold Pursuit, so I could write a review slamming Neeson. I could take this opportunity to use my own particular soap box to pile on to the cavalcade already flowing in Neeson’s direction. (And I suppose I’m actually doing that now, through this particular soap box.)

But you probably know I believe in separating the art from the artist as much as possible. It’s the philosophical approach to film criticism that I’ve chosen and I hope to keep sticking to it as long as I find it tenable.

But I don’t want there to be the chance that I’ll like Cold Pursuit and write a positive review of it in the days immediately following Neeson’s completely obtuse revelation of his own deep-seated prejudices.

Not reviewing it at all is the least I can do.

Neeson was already likely approaching the end of his revenge thriller days at age 66. This will escalate that. And apparently, he's going senile in addition to being racist.