Non-Stop. A review and a look at the birth of the modern retro action thriller

I like the Taken movies. No, scratch that, I fucking love those movies. Fastpaced action, condense storytelling and one of the best on screen action heroes of this millenia.

Bryan Mills is both the best and the worst dads in the world. He is overbearing and clingy, and he doesn't realise that his "little girl" is actually a grown up... oh well, a teenager. At the same time he travels the world, puts hus life in danger and kills over 30 people in cold blood, all for his "little girl".

So why am I talking about Taken when I should be talking about Non-stop?
Well, without Taken there wouldn't have been a Non-stop.

Taken is, on paper, nothing but yet another Van Damme or Segal movie. An ex-superagent wants to reconnect with his somewhat estranged daughter. Well, he's in luck (sort of), she gets kidnapped and he only have 48 hours to find her. With his superagent detective skills and a fair amount of excessive force, he battles his way through Paris and finally finds his daughter in the nick of time.

With a little imagination this could actually be mistaken for Schwarzeneggers classic Commando or Van Dammes Die hard wanna-be Sudden death (both very enjoyable action flicks) except for one major difference; Liam Neeson. Neeson is a major actor, I'm not saying JCVD or the terminator are not major actors, but we can all agree that Liam Neeson is in a whole other league.
Casting Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills transformed Taken from a silly but entertaining 90 minutes into a gritty, serious action thriller that portrays a crime that happens all the time in the real world that we might not be aware is that serious.

Neesons acting skills elevated the movie out of the B-action swamp and turned it into a world wide sensation, and thus a new genre of action movies was born.

In rapid sucsession, Liam Neeson appeared in several action and thrillers.
Unknown, The A-team, The grey and of course taken 2. They were all B-movie material (The grey is the exception. That movie is actually an amazing movie) that were graced by the presence of a great actor. This made the rest of the cast&crew work extra hard to make the movie better than it should have been.

I'm probably generalising a bit. A-team woild probably have been awesome even if Neeson didn't play Hannibal.

Of course, by becoming a household name among action fans, Neesons earlier movies have been somewhat over shadowed. Movies like Schindlers list and Kinsey that really made use of his acting skills. But can never forget that it was because of these earlier performances that we reacted the way we did when Taken came out. That a serious actor (with a somewhat tarnished rep after a certain Sci-fi epic) would take on a silly action movie and actually make it good.

Todays audience will always think of Bryan Mills when they hear the name Liam Neeson, while the somewhat older audience might think of Rob Roy, Oscar Schindler or even Qui-Gon Jinn. But some of us will remember how Liam Neeson transformed himself from actor to the greatest actionhero of the second millenia.


So what about Non-stop? Any good?

It's basicly taken 3 (that one is actually coming next year) and Neeson once again saves a kind of lackluster thriller and makes it enjoyable by simply being awesome at what he does. apart from a few silly twists and a way to over the top ending, both the writers and the director have made decent enough efforts to make a good movie.