The Best Liam Neeson Movies, Definitively Ranked

Though the best Liam Neeson movies can compete with any number of peers’ filmographies, there’s a lot of Neeson out there for fans to sort through. Going over my all-time Letterboxd stats recently, I noticed that behind Samuel L. Jackson but competitive with almost everyone else on my list of most-watched actors was Neeson, who indeed has come to rival Jackson in his mixed, constant stream of scene-stealing supporting roles, prestige projects, and absolute garbage that’s lucky to have him. In the 2020s alone, for example, he’s done 11 movies, mostly starring roles, with another five solidly on the way. The man likes to work, and there’s additional poignancy when you realize that he ramped up his already-prolific career after his wife Natasha Richardson died in a 2009 ski accident. A sense of guilt, regret, and grieving winds through much of his later-period work, even when it appears to be boomer boilerplate.

The hardcore Neesonheads can roll out for every neo-Eastwoodian old-man thriller briefly booked into a few thousand theaters on its way to streaming immortality, but those just catching up might understandably want a more curated experience. Here, then, are the 13 best Liam Neeson movies, ranked with eye toward both their overall quality and the quality of Neeson’s performance. Both are high in all titles, but there are certain films where his work looms over the rest, and others where he gives a fantastic supporting performance but doesn’t actually factor as heavily into the movie at hand. This is all to say that yes, there are certain circumstances where Darkman does rate more highly than Silence.

Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection

One more big-ticket prestige picture well into Neeson’s Elder Statesman phase. He's the famed sex researcher in this compelling if somewhat constricted biopic from Bill Condon. Watching his nuanced work in this kind of movie, you can see why, a few years later, he felt like an unlikely, even reluctant, action hero (despite his ample action-hero-training experience). He’s able to convey a sensitivity within his authoritative-sounding voice and towering height that keeps him from tough-guy caricature. Then again, playing Kinsey's feelings of guilt over sex and the inadequacy of his own research turns out to have been great prep for all of the more explicitly haunted roles he would play later on.

Paramount/Everett Collection

Liam Neeson and Martin Scorsese have worked together twice, with Neeson playing a supporting role in two historical epics: Gangs of New York, in which his appearance is confined to the film’s prologue; and Silence, which at first seems to be using Neeson in a similar way. He plays a Jesuit priest who (off screen) renounces his faith on a conversion trip to Japan, inspiring two of his students (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) to track him down. Here, Neeson does reappear later in the film, a cornerstone of the film’s anguished consideration of faith and its attendant difficulties and mysteries. At this point, Neeson had been a fixture of cinema for nearly a quarter-century; not as long as Scorsese, but enough for his character’s shift to throw the audience off-balance alongside the protagonists. It’s also just a terrifically rigorous and thoughtful movie, the likes of which Neeson was admittedly in need of after so many years of action pictures and thrillers (good as some of them are).

United Artists/Everett Collection

Upstaged by Braveheart a few months after its release despite being the much better movie, this loosely historical epic casts Neeson as Rob Roy MacGregor, a Scotsman who takes on aristocratic oppressors. Tim Roth was deservedly Oscar-nominated for his villainous supporting role opposite Neeson—just as Ralph Fiennes was, two years prior, for Schindler’s List (and, in a non-baddie role, Laura Linney was, a decade later, for Kinsey). There’s something steadfast about Neeson in these earlier movie-star roles that allow his showier co-stars to shine, but that doesn’t mean he’s giving it less than his all, and Rob Roy showcases his physical prowess in one of the great movie swordfights.

Universal/Everett Collection

Just as Devil in a Blue Dress should have been a franchise-starter for Denzel Washington in the late ‘90s, A Walk Among the Tombstones, released the same year as Taken 3, should have been a nice transition into Neeson adapting multiple books about unlicensed private investigator Matt Scudder. Alas, this taut and textured thriller, well-directed by ace screenwriter Scott Frank, did lousy box office compared to Neeson’s overseas adventures, and so the series became a one-and-done (watch for an inferior streaming TV show at some point in the next decade, I assume). The movie gets a little bit airport-novel in the final stretch, but Neeson, as a sobered-up ex-cop still grappling with (what else?) his demons, was born to play an unlicensed private investigator looking into stuff.

Open Road Films/Everett Collection

Marketing (and maybe some wishful thinking) made this hardscrabble adventure picture look like Neeson vs. Wolves, which had some audiences howling with displeasure when that big conflict is deferred until the film’s final shot. What they got instead, is the best movie of writer-director Joe Carnahan’s career, thanks in large part to Neeson’s work as the leader of a group of men stranded in Alaska following a plane crash. The wolves don’t just pop up at the end; they’re stalking the group the whole time, with Neeson using his knowledge as a wolf-shooter to protect the group even as he questions his own will to live after a recent tragedy he’s experienced. This is as good a time as any to point out that the snowy, cold, faith-questioning The Grey came together in 2010 and was shot in 2011, less than two years after Neeson’s wife died in a ski accident. There’s a walking-wounded quality to Neeson’s performance here that he has often replicated but less frequently equaled. The film as a whole is the male-bonding version of the bereaved-solo-lady-gains-gumption survival story Gravity made even more popular the following year, with more reflection than some of us might typically expect from a Carnahan joint.

Lucasfilm Ltd./Everett Collection

OK, time to cheat a little. Starting at the end of the 20th century, Neeson graduated into wise-mentor roles, and played those parts for Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese; on the A-Team; and as a CG lion, among others, before performing the rare from-mentor-to-action reversal. For that Elder Statesman period, it’s hard to beat his one-two-three punch of mentoring Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker (briefly), and the goddamn Batman. Can anyone be expected to choose between the two? His mentor-to-villain role in Batman Begins is more traditional, but allows Neeson to exercise a little more range within what had then become an expected component of his on-screen persona, revealing himself as the Batman big bad Ra’s al Ghul before an explosive finale.

Qui-Gon Jinn of Phantom Menace, frequently cited by half-wits as a cipher, is actually one of George Lucas’s more complicated creations, in part because of a slight opacity that Neeson in turn conceals, at least partially, with his combination of warmth and authority. We aren’t always completely aware of what Qui-Gon is thinking as he embarks upon Jedi missions, recruits Anakin for the order, and assists the Queen of Naboo in resisting a greedy blockade, but his confidence defuses doubts about his decisions—until that voice is silenced prematurely. He’s the rare Star Wars character who seems more complex with additional thought. Phantom Menace also means that Neeson has worked with Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas. If he hurries up and does a movie with Brian De Palma, he could be the only current actor to score that quadruple play!

Warner Bros/Everett Collection

OK, time to cheat mightily. Originally, I was debating which title to select from Neeson’s four-movie partnership with B-movie maestro Jaume Collet-Serra to represent those films on this list. It was down to Non-Stop or The Commuter, and to be honest, his monologue as the beleaguered, framed air marshal in Non-Stop (“I’m not a good father! I’m not a good man!”) probably would have prevailed in the end. Then I thought: In what circumstances would someone want to watch Non-Stop but not his other, mostly Hitchcockian thrillers? Neeson’s partnership with Collet-Serra appeared in the afterglow of his success with Taken, a Luc Besson-penned programmer conspicuously absent from this list, because half-ironic xenophobic righteous-revenge pulp isn’t actually a great fit for Neeson’s self-punishingly Catholic persona (despite that movie’s own iconic monologue). But a seemingly ordinary or above-average man haunted by demons or weaknesses, backed into a situation limited by time or location, as is the case in all four of these movies? That’s more like it.

Unknown is perhaps the most underrated of the quartet, and the most nouveau-Hitchcock, where Neeson wakes up from an auto accident to find he has been replaced in his own life. Non-Stop and The Commuter place a flawed, guilty family man into fast-moving vehicles that close in on him, rather than providing means of escape from his failed domesticity; they practically beg for a Neeson-on-a-boat potboiler to complete the trilogy. Run All Night is the outlier, more akin to a 1950s crime picture, but still effective. Neeson makes a convincing action hero, but these four movies make the case that he’s at his movie-star best in old-fashioned thrillers—movies where the characters’ flaws matter more than the punches he throws to get out of a bind.

Universal/Everett Collection

Apart from his mentor role in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Liam Neeson has been too old to properly fit into the contemporary superhero boom, both practically and spiritually; he harkens back to an earlier form of hard-to-stop cinematic tough guy. As it happens, Sam Raimi’s comic-book pictures harken back to an earlier form of superhero, pulpier and weirder and more influenced by horror comics, and the anguish of a young Neeson turned out to be perfect for Raimi’s sui generis, pre-boom superhero: the melty-faced, gravel-voiced Darkman. God, that voice of his: the rare Irish actor whose attempts at an American accent lose little of his native musicality, Neeson is a pleasure just to listen to, and as such well-suited to playing a masked man.

Of course, he’s not concealed for all of Darkman, not even the sections after his character is horribly disfigured; his scientist’s whole deal is his attempt the development of a synthetic skin (hence the meltiness), and in one memorable scene he dons his own face in public before having a meltdown at a carnival. It’s a perfect yet counterintuitive use of Neeson’s intensity—not precisely parodic (Raimi sincerely loves this stuff), but pitched at a heightened level that’s almost gleeful. Neeson has played plenty of comic, self-kidding parts (and will presumably do more of that in the new Naked Gun movie); his deadpan is priceless, but his ability to play this precise version of a Sam Raimi superhero might be even more rare.

Universal/Everett Collection

Look, if you’re seeking some fun Liam Neeson movie-star vehicle, obviously this isn’t it. But Neeson gave a career-making performance in Steven Spielberg’s holocaust drama, and though he’s sometimes been retroactively overshadowed by Ralph Fiennes (who, like Neeson, received an Oscar nomination for his work) and Ben Kingsley (who, shamefully, did not!), his work as Oskar Schindler is instrumental to the movie’s power. Schindler, a member of the Nazi party and would-be profiteer, witnesses the atrocities of the Holocaust and quietly decides to save Jews by diverting them into a faulty munitions-building operation. He’s a con man who rises to the occasion, requiring Neeson’s charisma as well as a hint of the inner turmoil that comes to the surface in many later roles. In one of his most indelible scenes, he explains to his Jewish accountant Itzhak (Kingsley) where his skills lie: “That’s what I’m good at. Not the work, not the work… the presentation.” Maybe later appreciations tend to favor the Fiennes or Kingsley performances because Neeson is front and center for a late scene that takes some out of the movie: The typically unflappable Schindler breaks down, lamenting that he could have done more, could have saved more people. Personally, I can scarcely think of this scene without bursting into tears, so I tend to think it’s necessary. Neeson is giving the audience an outlet here. Sometimes it seems like that’s what he’s been doing for most of his career.