By Robert Scucci
| Published
I have a Liam Neeson problem that I don’t think I’ll ever get over at this point in my life. After he absolutely crushed it in the 2025 Naked Gun reboot, I can’t, for the life of me, go back to his more intense action roles and take him seriously. Now, I’m constantly waiting for a witty bit of wordplay, or for him to play it completely straight, only for the camera to zoom out and reveal that he’s wearing a miniskirt. It’s causing all sorts of problems, and I couldn’t help but enjoy 2014’s Non-Stop for all the wrong reasons when I fired it up on Netflix this past weekend.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently terrible about Non-Stop. It’s a serviceable action thriller, like most films Neeson attached himself to after 2009’s Taken transformed him into a bankable action star at 57 years old. You also need to go into movies like Non-Stop knowing how unrealistic they are because realism isn’t the point here.
In case you’re wondering what the point of films like Non-Stop is, it’s really a simple formula: good guy with gun looking for bad guy with bomb on plane. That’s all there is to it. Switch your brain off for this one, and just know that you’re not going to get any cheeky one-liners here, as much as I would like for you to.
By-The-Numbers, But Does It Well
Going into Non-Stop, you need to know how incredibly generic its plot is. Liam Neeson plays Bill Marks, a U.S. Air Marshal who’s afraid of flying and has a troubled past. He sits down next to a woman named Jen Summers (Julianne Moore) on their non-stop flight from New York City to London, and the two hit it off. Between exchanging pleasantries and Bill getting up to use the restroom, he receives menacing texts on his secured line stating that if he doesn’t wire $150 million to a specific routing and account number, a passenger will be killed every 20 minutes.
Not knowing whether somebody’s pranking him or not, Bill confronts another Air Marshal who’s on board, Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), who suspiciously writes it off and tells him to forget about it. Twenty minutes pass, and an altercation in the restroom results in Bill killing Jack in self-defense. Bill receives another text telling him to reset the 20-minute clock and realizes that he needs to solve this problem himself.
Against the wishes of everybody he works with back on the ground, Bill kicks off an investigation immediately because this entire movie is a never-ending series of zero-hour tropes. Along the way, he butts heads with a flight attendant named Gwen (Lupita Nyong’o), a surgeon named Dr. Fahim Nasir (Omar Metwally), and a disgruntled NYPD officer named Austin (Corey Stoll). Not only is everybody under Bill’s watch acting incredibly suspicious, which for some people you could chalk up to airplane anxiety, but they’re also suspicious of him. Not knowing about Jack’s death, all the passengers see is a frantic Liam Neeson running around the plane trying to figure out who’s texting him and whether they’re even on the plane.
Things take a turn for the worse when it’s revealed that Bill is being set up, possibly by somebody on the inside, as the bank account he says needs to be funded was opened in his name, suggesting that this is all an elaborate plot on his part to get a quick payday and disappear.
You Know Where This One Is Going Before It Even Starts
Every single action movie trope is shamelessly celebrated in Non-Stop, and I’m not saying that as a criticism. Despite its February 2014 release, this is very much a summer popcorn flick that you throw on to enjoy the drama within a very specific set of parameters. You know the good guy is probably going to make it out alive after his trials and tribulations, and you know stuff is going to blow up. You know that the bomb is going to count down to the very last possible second before it’s defused, and you know that our hero, who was wrongfully set up, will be vindicated and considered a hero before the credits roll.
You’ll know all of that going into Non-Stop, but you won’t care because Liam Neeson is the most badass action hero in his age bracket, and you can’t argue otherwise with me. Had he gotten into the genre when he was younger, he would have given both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger a run for their money. What’s upsetting about this fact is the confirmation of everything we expected when The Naked Gun came out last year: Liam Neeson is a fantastic comedian when he goes full deadpan with a wink, making me wish some of the thrillers he made in the 2010s had a little more humor in them.
By itself, Non-Stop is serviceable, with the expected production values you’d see in a movie that’s basically Die Hard on a plane. With The Naked Gun in mind, I wish it was a comedy because there’s so much potential here, but that’s just me nitpicking. Still, if he pulled out his gun and said “welcome to the mile high club” before popping off rounds and diving through air, I’d like this movie even more.
As of this writing, Non-Stop is streaming on Netflix.
