Liam Neeson cut his tough-guy teeth in a ‘Dirty Harry’ movie.

Liam Neeson has made quite a name for himself playing tough-as-nails badasses. He was in excellent form as the avenging father in the 2008 English/French action thriller Taken, where he sent chills through the collective spines of his audience when he told everyone about his “special set of skills” and that death was coming for those terrible men who kidnapped his 17-year-old daughter.

Neeson exudes a tough guy naturalism that fits him like a tailored glove and audiences can’t seem to get enough of it. Think of films like The Grey, where we watch him duke it out with a pack of wolves for 90 minutes, or A Walk Among the Tombstones, where the actor again takes up the mantle of a grizzled ass-kicker. It would seem that Neeson and crime-thriller films are a match made in neo-noir heaven. But it all had to start somewhere at some time. That time was back in the wild and the woolly 1980s and that place was in the final installment of the Dirty Harry franchise, The Dead Pool.

What Is ‘The Dead Pool’ About?

At the start of The Dead Pool, Detective Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), otherwise known as Dirty Harry, has just put away the big-time gangster Lou Janero (Anthony Charnota) with his typical shoot-first and ask-questions-later police work, making him a San Francisco celebrity.

The newspapers print glowing reviews of the curmudgeon cop, much to Callahan’s trademark disdain, and it catches the attention of the who’s who of The San Francisco glitterati. News reporter Samantha Walker (Patricia Clarkson) wants to run a big story on the always angry Callahan against his sensibilities.

Unfortunately, his fame has provoked the ire and vengeance of Janero, who has a hit-out on Callahan, and has also caught the attention of a horror-movie-obsessed serial killer, whose interest in Callahan is piqued after he catches a report about the Janero case on TV. He cryptically adds Harry’s name to a list of celebrities, and mysteriously, the camera never reveals the character’s face. Still, a quick pan around the room gives the audience the notion that this is some horror film director. What does it all mean, who is this mysterious fellow, and what does he want with Callahan?

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Enter Liam Neeson, who portrays Peter Swan, a beleaguered horror film director who gets wrapped up in the Callahan murder investigation when rock singer Johnny Squares (Jim Carrey) is found dead in his trailer during a music video shoot directed by Swan.

Swan is a shady and unscrupulous director with a penchant for taking bets on when celebrities will kick the bucket in a game he likes to call “the dead pool,“ which Callahan discovers after Samantha breaks the story. The game is like any other betting pool but has a horrible twist.

Participants bet on which celebrity will die (presumably by natural causes) in a given month. Johnny Squares is on that list and winds up dead, and so is Harry Callahan. When other celebrities from Swan’s list end up being murdered in ways that mimic the deaths in the Peter Swan films, Swan becomes the target of Callahan’s investigation, and the hostility between the two is palpable from their first moments on camera together.

Harry is a hard-boiled detective who is quick with a gun and an accusation with a disdain for murder and mayhem that seems out of place because wherever he goes, murder and mayhem follow. He finds the vampiric nature of the media’s death worship disgusting, and this collides rather nicely with Swan’s artistic conceptualization of horror, violence, and death as a cathartic release of fear — an exorcism of dark and base desires that speaks to the core of humanity.

‘The Dead Pool’ Was Liam Neeson’s First Action Movie

Neeson’s portrayal is not without his trademark grit as he stands up to Harry Callahan’s cold scrutiny, never once wavering from his innocence

While the tough-guy accolades go to Eastwood in this neo-noir thriller, the seeds of Neeson’s badass screen persona take shape in this film. His amorality bumps against Eastwood’s battle-hardened exterior, creating a compelling dynamic between the two characters that is worthy of audience attention.

As the horror movie director Peter Swan, Neeson is worthy of Callahan’s barbs but also worthy of absolution, as Swan’s amorality does not demand his culpability. In reality, Swan is just an artist who truly believes in his art who is being framed by a hack screenwriter, Harlan Rook (David Hunt), who is murdering people on Swan’s list to frame him as revenge for not producing and directing a terrible film that Rook wanted to make. Swan’s frame-up is in many ways a product of his ego and his belief that his films play an important role in assuaging humanity’s darkest desires; the irony is that he is a victim of these desires.

Still, Swan is a beast and relentless in his beliefs, which is beautifully illustrated in the first meeting between Callahan and Swan. After Johnny dies, Callahan and company appear to investigate, and he is more than dismissive of Swan’s proclivities as a horror director.

Callahan confronts Swan about Johnny Squares’ use of drugs on set, something that Swan had previously warned Squares about doing. But Callahan feels Squares’ use of heroin is more or less the fault of the director, who should have put a stop to it.

But Swan glares into Callahan’s eyes and tells him that what people do is their own business, drugs made Squares controversial, and that puts “bums in seats.” Swan will not be intimidated by Callahan, which is remarkable given Callahan’s penchant for beating the breaks off of people and shooting people dead with his giant .44 magnum.

Later, when the story about Swan’s dead pool is broken, he becomes the target of media scrutiny. Dirty Harry initially believes that Swan’s motive for allegedly murdering the people on his list is to win the pool, but again, Swan denies this.

He makes no apologies for who he is or the game itself, stating that it’s just harmless fun and that while it may be distasteful, that is only a matter of opinion. Further to this point, when the media mob, he stands defiantly in front of them and declares that “nothing will stop me from making this film.”

 He is unbreakable, and it’s endearing because Neeson can convey to the audience that Swan is a true believer in his art form and, with that, there is a type of divine nonchalance that will see that he makes it out alive and free by the end of the film. Neeson’s real skill as an actor is to assure the audience that he’ll carry us through to the other side when the chips are down.