His second wind has been going on for so long that there’s an entire generation of cinemagoers out there who can’t remember a time when the notion of Liam Neeson succeeding as an action hero was best described as fanciful, if not completely unrealistic.

Sure, he’d always been tall and ruggedly handsome, but very rarely had he shown the inclination to kick ass and take names. He was a character actor first and foremost, and while he was also more than familiar with the odd flight of fancy or blockbuster franchise, he was typically found playing a supporting role as a mentor or father figure of some description.

Of course, when Taken came along, it changed everything. The throat-punching odyssey across Europe was a certified sleeper hit that reinvented Neeson as a grizzled badass, and all of a sudden, his desk was being flooded with similar offers. There’s nothing wrong with striking while the iron is at its hottest, but the star has spent roughly half of his unexpected renaissance declaring that his days as an action hero are numbered.

“People keep sending me scripts for action movies, and I turn around to my agent and say, ‘Do they know what fecking age I am?’” he once admitted to The Skinny. “Maybe another 18 months of them, but then I think audiences won’t want it.” That’s fair enough for an actor who, with the greatest of respect, is an elderly gentleman. However, those comments came in 2016, eight years after Taken.

He’d been donning leather jackets and pulverising miscellaneous henchmen for close to a decade at that point already, and he probably believed the end was nigh. Even being generous, fast-forwarding 18 months to that point would bring Neeson to the middle of 2018, where he believed he’d no longer be running and gunning onscreen.

Since the middle of 2018, how many action thrillers has he appeared in? To be blunt, a shitload. Widows, Cold Pursuit, Honest Thief, The Ice Road, The Marksman, Blacklight, Memory, Retribution, and In the Land of Saints and Sinners have all been released between then and now, and he’s nowhere near being done yet with Thug, Cold Storage, The Ice Road 2: Road to the Sky (which is a real movie title, for some reason) and Hotel Tehran all on the way.

Neeson says, ’18 months of action and then I’m done’, but what Neeson really means is, ‘After those 18 months, I’m going to make at least 14 more of them, and then maybe I’ll see what happens’. The biggest question is why, and the most obvious answer is more than likely the simplest: money.

He might be into his 70s, but if people will pay him silly amounts of cash to wander around and snap some necks, then he won’t say no. Neeson has come right out and claimed on multiple occasions that he’s giving up the action hero mantle, but unless studios stop reversing that dump truck full of cash to his front door, he might end up literally going out on his sword.