Neeson again the conflicted, death-defying action guy

IF there's trouble lurking and killing to be done, chances are that 62-year-old Liam Neeson is in the picture. The jaded, world-weary characters he plays are rarely squeaky clean - their pasts are shady and their morals suitably murky - but when the chips are down and the bad guys are closing in, who you gonna call?

In a previous life, Neeson was adept at playing patriots and heroic historical figures (Oskar Schindler, Rob Roy, Michael Collins, among others); these days, he's reinvented himself as the go-to guy whenever the script calls for a retirement-age agent/hitman with weight of the world on his shoulders and a particular set of skills on his resumé. Despite a dubious professional past, his characters tend to have a high regard for family, a healthy disregard for authority and a useful ability to squash villains by the truckload. More importantly, he can be relied upon to inflict major damage at the box office.

In Run All Night, Neeson is Jimmy Conlon, a one-time enforcer and hitman for New York gang boss Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), who keeps him on the payroll for old times' sake. The two of them are firm friends and old-school gangsters, but now Jimmy is washed-up, perpetually drunk, haunted by his dark past and estranged from his son Mike (Joel Kinnaman), a limo driver who deeply resents him.