At the beginning of this year, Liam Neeson once again said he was planning to retire from making action thrillers, with the veteran badass looking for a change of pace as he approaches his 70th birthday next summer. Of course, we’ve heard him say the exact same thing before, only for his slate to become more jam-packed than ever before.
When Neeson claimed he’d get his current to-do list out of the way before hanging up his guns for good, he was promoting action thriller Honest Thief. So far this year we’ve seen him in action thriller The Marksman and action thriller The Ice Road, while up next is action thriller Blacklight, action thriller Memory and action thriller Retribution, so at least he’s mixing it up until he possibly plays Frank Drebin in Seth MacFarlane’s Naked Gun reboot.
All joking aside, one of Neeson’s recent star vehicles is potentially getting a sequel, and wouldn’t you believe it, it’s an action thriller. Cold Pursuit first hit theaters in February 2019, but it only managed to pull in $76 million at the box office against a $60 million budget, although it did score some of the best reviews seen by his late-career output after winding up with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 69%.
Neeson played a snowplow driver investigating the mysterious death of his son, who finds himself pitted against a drug lord called Viking. It leaned much more into absurd comedy and happenstance than the leading man’s usual fare, but it didn’t exactly come dripping with franchise potential. Production company StudioCanal seem confident, though, but we’ll just have to wait and see if that retirement gets put off a little longer.
