It's common for me to become aware of an actor's name and talent, only for it to turn out that I've actually been watching them for years in films but they never quite registered with me. Not so in the case of Liam Neeson: I distinctly remember the first time I watched the 1984 movie The Bounty, which would have been in the late summer of 1985, and came out of it saying 'that big Irish guy has really got charisma' (or words to that effect). This wasn't his first film, of course – since then I've caught up with his earlier performances in Excalibur and Krull from earlier in the 80s.

Neeson's career, at first glance, looks not-atypical as that of a certain kind of actor – a few minor parts in high-profile genre movies, then a shift into more mainstream, quality fare, and finally some big lead roles. Let us not forget the critical acclaim and recognition Neeson received for Schindler's List, Michael Collins, and Kinsey. Of course, the fact that I think it necessary to mention this is because there has been a bit of a shadow over the big man's career of late. I'm not even referring to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

I usually steer clear of commenting in too much detail on the personal lives of... well, anyone, but in Liam Neeson's case I think it is pertinent to his career. Neeson suffered a family bereavement a few years ago and has said in interviews that, since then, working constantly has been a coping mechanism. I am not unsympathetic to Neeson's situation, but I can't help thinking that this may have had a bit of a negative impact when it comes to quality control. Never mind his turn as Hannibal in The A Team movie, in 2012 Neeson got two Golden Raspberry nominations in the same year (for Wrath of the Titans and Battleship).

And yet he has had an odd sort of rebirth as an action hero, mainly because of the influence of Luc Besson and the Taken movies. He's in this mode in Jaume Collet-Serra's Non-Stop, which is a film unlikely to do much to revive his reputation – but neither will it do it much damage, I suspect.

Neeson plays Bill Marks, who basically seems rather like all the other action heroes he has given us in recent years. Perhaps on this occasion Neeson is giving us rather more baleful old sod than usual, and it's difficult not to read too much into Neeson's portrayal of the character: Marks is a man clearly going through trying personal times, and almost seems to be in the throes of some kind of breakdown. We first meet him in an overcast airport car park, where he is idly stirring whiskey into his coffee, but soon enough he is getting onto his plane.

For, yes, this is another of those airliner-in-peril action thrillers, and the film gets on with introducing the various passengers and flight crew with an admirable lack of messing about. Neeson shows us that beneath the baleful old sod exterior there beats the heart of a softy, by helping a nervous little girl who loses her cuddly toy, while also on board are various ethnically diverse yuppies, blue-collar guys, potential love interests, and so on. With the plane in flight (the airline in question is the rather implausible-sounding British Aqualantica, which tells us that none of the real companies wanted to get involved), things get going properly as Neeson (a cop turned federal air marshal) receives a text from a mysterious source informing him that until $150 million is transferred to a particular bank account, one person on the plane will be murdered every twenty minutes. Looks like Neeson picked the wrong week to stop being a paranoid gun-toting alcoholic!

Without giving too much away, Non-Stop does end up being a little bit bonkers, and I'm not sure the plot is entirely hole-free, but the echoes of Airplane! are not too intrusive. The script does a good job of keeping everything trotting along for most of the film's duration, and is actually quite inventive – Neeson finds himself implicated in the various crimes occurring on the plane, and thus has to resolve the situation without the assistance of his colleagues on the ground.

One interesting possibility that the film dangles briefly in front of us is that Neeson's colleagues may actually be in the right, and that everything we're seeing is just some sort of paranoid delusion being experienced by someone having a booze-fuelled breakdown. For a while it does look like the only person actually causing chaos on the flight is Neeson himself, and the various shots from his point-of-view have a slightly disjointed, queasy quality that definitely implies all is not well.

In the end, though – and I suppose this may constitute a spoiler – everything is pretty much what it seems to be. There really is a terrorist, and of course he isn't after the money as such, he just wants to make a slightly contrived socio-political point about modern American society. We're quite a long way post-9/11 for people to still be making as explicitly post-9/11 movies as this one, if you ask me, but this is just a fig-leaf for the action thriller stuff so it didn't really grate with me too much. It's also quite liable to date, I suspect, simply because of the plot's reliance on smartphones and suchlike: Neeson spends a lot of his time barking at the flight crew to switch the plane's wi fi on and off, for various reasons.

Hey ho. Neeson isn't quite phoning it in, that famous charisma of his remains undiminished, and it's perhaps his presence that has led to the appearance in the film of Julianne Moore, a rather classier actress than this sort of script honestly deserves. Also present and doing decent work are people like Scoot McNairy and Michelle Dockery (who I understand is a soap opera actress doing her best to break into films).

Non-Stop is a film which you've probably seen before under a different title – the ingredients and serving have all been jiggled around a bit to make them look new, but the actual recipe is one which has been doing the rounds for many years now. It's still quite a good recipe and Neeson carries the movie reasonably well – this isn't going to win any awards, and I hope Liam Neeson can find himself a quality project to appear in soon, but as implausible action movies go I've seen much worse.

Awix

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