I just watched Netflix’s Frankenstein yesterday, an excellent film that could end up with at least some amount of Oscar Nominations (for costuming and makeup, at the very least). Frankenstein, however, has now slid down Netflix’s Top 10 movies list, now at #6, and the new #1 is a Liam Neeson film, The Marksman, that is…divisive, to say the least.
In The Marksman, Neeson plays a rancher and ex-Marine who protects a boy fleeing the cartel. The movie has dramatically split critics and audiences with a 37% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics and an 83% audience score. That’s a 46% gap.
In the wake of the success of multiple Taken movies, Liam Neeson went down a deep, deep rabbit hole of action movies that are at the very least, Taken-adjacent. And I do mean deep. 2021’s The Marksman is one of them, but there are so many others, and often, they do split fans and critics. Though many times they don’t, and it can be a hilariously huge range. Let’s go through them:
- In the Land of Saints and Sinners – 83% critic score, 74% audience score
- Cold Pursuit – 68% critic score, 44% audience score
- Absolution – 56% critic score, 32% audience score
- The Commuter – 55% critic score, 40% audience score
- The Ice Road – 43% critic score, 31% audience score
- Honest Thief – 41% critic score, 87% audience score
- The Marksman – 37% critic score, 83% audience score
- Retribution – 30% critic score, 67% audience score
- Memory – 29% critic score, 80% audience score
- Marlowe – 25% critic score, 37% audience score
- Ice Road: Vengeance – 15% critic score, 24% audience score
- Blacklight – 12% critic score, 82% audience score
Okay I gotta stop. These are all movies he’s done since 2018. He is cranking these out like nobody’s business. Some critics and audiences hate, some critics hate and audiences love, only a few times do they both love the film, and critics, as a whole, hate almost all of these.
What’s the deal? I think the long and short of it is that critics often do not like dumb action movies, while audiences are much more forgiving of that genre, hence the big split, including for The Marskman here. Though there’s a limit, and sometimes a movie is just so bad that both groups agree.
As for The Marksman, I’ll probably lean toward the audience score here, and if you want a mindless Liam Neeson action movie, you could do worse, as clearly shown here. Though lord knows you have plenty to choose from.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.